Five years ago the father of Lorenzo Loseto, the worthy chef at George, died of Alzheimers. Now Loseto is remembering him with a fundraiser for research and has recruited a team of chefs to help out....

Just last night I went to Senses, newly made over as a customer-friendly boite and with pleasingly idiosyncratic menu by Patrick Lin, and ate foie gras three ways, sauteed, poached and a little bloc of terrine. All of them slipped down like silk. How much longer will I be able to eat foie gras as animal power grows. I just hope Canada driven by Quebec resists the efforts of the animal activists to have the supreme gourmet dish banned. Foie gras is now banned in Germany, Israel, Poland, Norway, Chicago and California, all places the true foodie should avoid. Leading supermarkets in Britain don't carry it either but specialty stores do.

Now comes word that the Prince of Wales after a chat with the snowdrops decided he would give up foie gras, and in a churlish unneighbourly act, he's removing the royal warrant from a local shop House of Cheese which sells foie gras to eager buyers.

Wonder if the House of Cheese will retaliate by refusing to stock the Prince's own overpriced and high calorie brand Duchy Originals. Beats me how the prince can't produce as good a chocolate and fresh ginger biscuit as the cheaper Marks and Spencer brand.

In the past couple of weeks, there's been a lot of noise about the decline of the French Black Truffle or as they've been known for centuries, black diamonds. So few are being harvested in the truffle terroir of Southwest France that truffleculteurs are charging $2 grand a kilo for the fragrant fungi. Just how does a black truffle smell/taste? Musty, tunes of shitakes, porcini, slightly mouldy hay. Never underestimate the human taste for something slightly rotten.

Or are the French just miffed that one of their national foods is being so successfuly cultivated in New Zealand, the US, China! The modern truffle cultivation is scientific whereas the trad way of finding the black truffle in Var is romantic if not magical. Truffles grow on the roots of a local kind of dwarf oak and for centuries only the superior pig nose could root 'em out. However pigs are gourmands and tended to eat their finds. Also, truffle smugglers found that as they escaped with the swag, they got curious looks at the pig in the back seat. So dogs who aren't gourmands replaced pigs.

But France is now industrializing, urbanizing, the dogs don't get paid enough, the terroir is spoiled by global warming, the poster villain of every downturn. In any case much to truffleculteurs' chagrin, the French themselves are buying the black diamonds from China. Of course, the Chinese truffle doesn't taste like the French truffle and it may have food safety issues, but it costs less than $20 a lb.

The animal rights groups protesting foie gras, and in some cases threatening violence, are putting pressure on the French to find a way to preserve their food heritage. President Sarkozy is applying to Unesco to have French cuisine listed as part of the world's heritage and this would include foie gras as part of the French artisanal tradition. French wine producing regions such as Saint-Emilion and the Loire Valley already enjoy World Heritage status.

Several star chefs, including Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse and Michel Guerard, have been pushing for a French culinary listing for the past couple of years. Guy Savoy, one of the them, said that putting Gallic gastronomy on the Unesco list would protect restaurants and also charcutiers', cheese producers, wine makers and patissiers.

"You can talk about cuisine in numerous countries around the world. But France is the only one to have such diversity and such possibilities for transforming the produce of local artisans, be they on land or sea," he told news agencies.

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In response to my review of Zee Grill on Saturday, I got this terrific mail from Gary Blockhuis, retired now but once the owner of 22 fish and chip shops in Toronto. Now his son Gord and Gord's wife Rachel and a staff of 12 run Kingsway Fish & Chips (www.kingswayfishandchips.com).

Gary grew up in Holland in a picturesque village called Bunschoten Spakenburg, on the Zuider Zee ( Southern Sea) that Southern part of the North Sea which lies within Holland just below the North Sea. "We always ate fish every Friday and Saturday, My grandfather went out fishing on Monday and would not return with his catch till late Friday afternoon. It was always fresh fish, in fact back then if it wasn't alive when we brought it home we didn't eat it. That's also why Friday became Fish Night."

And Friday is still fish day for Gary, the day he goes to help out at Kingsway.

What gets up Gary's nose today is how fish is being trashed. " Today, with onboard processing and freezing of the fish we are assured that today's fish is always fresh. But that's not enough" he says. "Please, please, why does everyone need to jump on this mercury bandwagon. Yes there is some mercury in fish but you would have to eat fish almost daily for it to cause any real harm.

"Today we are smart, intelligent and well informed but we become like Lemmings when we hear something that may be harmful. We stop right there and close our minds.

Did you know that eating fish will also help prevent Juvenile Diabetes? But ithe adult world with its "built in" negative attitude and fear of mercury will never allow kids to eat a good diet of healthy Fish- better we sign them up into the MacDonald's food for life program..

We know that here are problems with all foods.You may want to go to You Tube and check out the recent "Lemon study" and how Lemons are covered with all kinds of bacteria and even fecal matter. Wow but isn't this the favourite garnish for our beverages? Now imagine the "raw" oyster drizzled with lemon juice.

Our bodies are incredibly unique, yes, we need a little dirt, some bacteria, even a little poison, to help build up immunities otherwise maybe we should just drink Lysol.

I decide today I will go out and eat a fish.

If only I’d known. Eating fish is a political act.

The food cops want me to eat fish, they allege omega 3 in fish will prevent a heart attack. So I start looking for a fine fish place.

But before I can make a reservation, I learn that not only is the great blue fin tuna laced with mercury but all fish has some degree of mercury in them.

As I’m not pregnant nor decrepit, the mercury may not have much effect and in any case I think tuna’s the Wagyu of the oceans, a pink gelatinous lump.

But now the Harvard School of Public Health, the top cop, says I must eat even mercury-laced fish otherwise I might have a heart attack.


   more »

The great news is in today's NYT, a report that sales of raw milk are seen to be rising in Connecticut --- dispite food cops' disapproval. Connecticut is one of more than twenty states which permit the sale of raw milk. Of course, Canada bans sale of raw milk on the grounds that unpasteurized milk may contain bad bacteria -- although ironically dairy farmers and their families are allowed to drink it -- without I should add any harm reported. And some restaurants get their raw milk cream from local farmers. Again no reports of illness.

I grew up drinking raw milk and I continue to drink it whenever I can. As the NYT story reports, raw milk has to be sold quickly, within a week, which means you are actually drinking fresh milk rather than the processed milk of the supermarkets and the most appalling development in dairy --- UHT milk which lasts forever without refrigeration and tastes like wallpaper paste.

Earlier in the week, the NYT reported the return of the local creamery....another great development in artisanal food.

Alas, don't look for these developments in Canada which is having trouble joining the Good Food Revolution. Dairy is regulated by the government for the benefit of the farmers not the consumers. At present, the owners of dairy
farms in Canada have an average net worth of nearly $1 million. (Fraser Institute: The Politics of Milk, 2002) They sell us milk at inflated and always rising prices and also get to drink raw milk themselves.

And one Ontario farmer Michael Schmidt is actually being hounded by the province for selling raw milk......the same stuff the farmers are allowed to drink...

For NYT story go to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/nyregion/

In the United States, 2006 brought two major outbreaks of E. coli, both resulting in deaths and numerous illnesses, ultimately traced to organically grown spinach and lettuce. According to the Center for Global Food Issues, organic foods make up about 1% of all the food sold in the United States, but it accounts for 8% of E. coli cases.

Sir Albert Howard and Rudolf Steiner, the fathers of the organic movement, were agreed that clean healthy earth would defend plants from disease and pests. Of course they thought organic food would be grown and then sold locally. They had no idea that organic food would be turned into just another commercial crop and trucked to distant markets -- with all the dangers involved.

Take Andy Valy and Susanna Chen, a couple who drank organic carrot juice (from California) in 2006 and subsequently contracted botulism, one of the deadliest forms of food poisoning. Chen has been immobilized since then and neither will full recover.

Valy says in the Toronto Star that he picked up a bottle of Bolthouse Farms carrot juice --it was organic, after all, so he figured it was the "healthier" choice.

Here we are north of the border and stuck with a dairy monopoly which sells us tasteless milk, anemic cream and butter, containing the lowest allowable amount of butterfat, and a law against raw milk...

Down south, American artisanal dairy which flourished before world war II is making a comeback, reports Marian Burros in today's New York Times.

"These artisanal operations are turning cow, goat or sheep milk into simple, straightforward foods like crème fraîche, butter, buttermilk, ice cream, puddings, custards, yogurt, yogurt-based sauces and yogurt drinks. Many of these dairies also sell unhomogenized, and in a few cases even unpasteurized, milk with an old-fashioned farmhouse flavor.

The movement is, in some ways, an offshoot of the American cheesemaking revival that began 15 to 20 years ago, and some of the creameries make fresh cheeses like mascarpone, mozzarella and ricotta that let the quality of the milk speak for itself.

Chalk it up to a lucky confluence of events. Most small dairy farmers cannot keep afloat selling milk to large processors at commodity prices, so those who are trying to survive are looking for alternatives. At the same time there is an increasingly sophisticated public that appreciates the difference between mass-produced dumbed-down food and the handiwork of a small dairy that has learned to produce exceptional butter or yogurt or ice cream by doing it the way it was done before World War II, when there was a creamery in every town."

For full article go to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/dining/20dairy.html?ref=dining

Chinatown: A stellar Chinese dessert discovery: “Flaky green pastries that resembled caterpillars” flavored with durian fruit “came to the table piping hot filled with a bright yellow pudding.” Find them at Chatham Square (6 Chatham Square). [Gothamist]

Andrew O'Hagan has great piece in today's Daily Telegraph about the latest bottled water flap....

It must be very confusing to people who lived through the real threat of doodlebugs: Britons now appear to live in a greater state of fear than at any time in our history. The times are relatively peaceful, infant mortality is negligible, most people have too much to eat, yet people all over the country seem to wake up every day to a heightened sense of dread.

Relieved that bird flu didn't carry them off in the middle of the night, they're worried that they might yet fall victim, at least by lunchtime, to the bad effects of red meat or the brain-frying properties of mobile phones. And then there's the planet on the edge of extinction. As if they didn't have enough to worry about, this week the scaremongers are fretting about drinking bottled water.

It seems people now need to panic in order to feel properly alive. A little bit of what you fancy is no longer deemed to be a good idea, mainly because people appear to get more enjoyment from feeling there must be a brutal cost accompanying any normal desire.

Lives seem emptier since we stopped having lives and starting having lifestyles: we feel that each of our choices describes us, fulfils us and that there's nothing more fulfilling than self-denial.

For article go to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/

William Stilwell, editor of Waitrose magazine which glorifies much of the elements of food snobbery has turned apostate as he praises Delia.....

In the Daily Mail today, he has turned on the last decade of elitism....

"For a start, you had to be ethical as well as have good taste buds. Could you be sure that your Arabica coffee bean was freshly roasted, let alone whether it had come from a Nicaraguan crop that was grown in certified organic conditions and was fairly traded - thus ensuring a decent wage for the labourers?

And what of the food miles your 70 per cent cocoa Cru Apurimac chocolate had travelled from its origins beside a river in Peru? Could your sweet tooth and gourmet sensibilities really be justified, given the carbon emissions that resulted from its transportation?

Yet was sourcing local food really any better? Even as we strove to support farmers' markets all was not as it seemed. For, word is, locally produced food can have a heavier carbon footprint than that of imported goods.

Think of the energy used to heat an Isle of White greenhouse to ripen tomatoes, or the fuel used by a small van to take a few veg to a nearby town, when a supermarket HGV would transport food from afar far more efficiently?

Oh, the anxieties have been endless.

But now, relief is at hand. If Delia says it's OK to cheat, then we can cast aside some of these ludicrous obsessions and get back to the simple business of cooking half-decent food for our friends and families.

For at the heart of being a good cook is the passion to give pleasure to one's guests - a truism that has been lost amid all the fuss and nonsense we've been dishing up lately.

Glorious fighting words.....

The Queen has spoken: the most important thing is to feed the poor and hungry so forget about the orgiastic organicheads, the foodmile fanatics, animal activists, crusaders and the elitests like "I'm ethical, you're not" Michael Pollan who promotes plants.

Delia Smith aka the legenday British cookbook writer and TV personality who has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary - "Do a Delia" - is speaking out as she launches her new cookbook, How to Cheat At Food.

Like the late Julia Child, Delia has down to earth priorities...

The queen of TV cookery said that access to cheap chicken is crucial for poor families and pensioners.

"I certainly don't like the way battery chickens are reared but, on the other hand, I'm aware we still have a lot of poverty, particularly among children and I feel that's a disgrace," she told Radio 4 yesterday.

"We have got to make sure everybody gets enough nutritious food to eat in the first place."

"I will stick to cooking," said Delia.

"I'll stick to teaching people to cook. I can't get into the politics of food."

She said that the taste of food mattered more than whether its ingredients were organic or environmentally friendly.

"If I go into a shop and I want to buy some beautiful fresh beetroot I will go for whatever looks best," she added.

"If it is organic I will buy it; if it isn't I will buy that."

She added that she is sceptical about the concept of "food miles" - the yardstick used by environmentalists to measure how much damage is caused by long-distance transport.

"I love fresh shelled peas in the winter from Kenya," she said.

"I'm sorry about the planet but I'm conscious there are people in Kenya getting employment and money to bring up their children."

Jay Rayner writing in today's Observer offers a stirring defense of supermarkets "self-satisfied opponents overlook their social benefits" - they are responsible for about half the fair trade products sold in Britain. And he reminds us that without supermarkets, foodies wouldn't be able to buy exotic foods to make the dishes they rave about.....

Money quotes....

Almost all of us use them and for one simple reason: they are bloody convenient. Not simply convenient as in that's more time for leisure pursuits. They are convenient as in they enable us to keep family and work life on an even keel. Why, in the years before mass retailing, did one parent stay at home and the other go out to work? Because keeping the house supplied was a full-time job. Whenever I have to listen to a full-on rant from my foodie brethren about the evils of supermarkets and why we should all shop only at local independent retailers, what I hear, unconsciously or otherwise, is an argument that is distinctly anti-woman.

.....There is another culinary argument in their favour. Yes, they sell too many ready meals loaded with too much salt and sugar. Yes, some of their products are simply grim. But at the same time, over the past 10 years, they have vastly increased and improved the range of ingredients available to the home cook. Many of our food writers rage against supermarkets, while at the same time proposing recipes that it would be impossible to prepare were it not for the economies of scale which enable those supermarkets to stock the esoteric ingredients they demand. They are also responsible for around half of all fair trade products sold in this country.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/17/fooddrinks.retail

Frightened by the size of your carbon footprint, frightened for the future of polar bears, frightened by food you eat, frightened... go to this article in NYT Times Anxious About Earth's Problems? There's Treatment.

The latest trivia is at...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/us/16therapy.html?

Campus slaughters? No ecoworry there.

Heresy from Delia Smith who has just come out with a new book How To Cheat At Cooking...


Tinned minced lamb! Frozen mashed potato! This sounds like an act of heresy against the new orthodoxy of sourcing fresh - and preferably organic - produce from local shops, using only natural ingredients, and using the freezer purely as a repository for Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia.

Delia bristles slightly. She has never 'done organic', she says. 'And it's still "death to the freezer" in the old way. You're not going out and buying half a pig now - that's all gone. And you're not going to be spending time cooking for your frigging freezer - because that's the same work and it doesn't taste good.'

For full story go to......http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wine/main.jhtml?xml=/wine/2008/02/16/nosplit/sm_deliasmith116.xml

When I entered The Harbord Room which has just opened at 89 Harbord, I didn’t feel the tectonic plates shifting, but by the time I leave, I recognize that the city’s restaurant focus has shifted upwards from Queen and College Streets. Now Harbord Street can claim bragging rights to the title of Toronto’s top restaurant row. Don’t know anywhere else that offers such a lineup from the unctuous ***1/2 Splendido to the *** 93 Harbord, Boulevard Café, Messis, Tati, and now The Harbord Room.

THR’s got an uptown glaze on it, Brad Denton (who designed Czehoski) has made a posh ‘hood hang that is fashionable Tuscan pink, part club, part bistro with marble topped tables, studded leather chairs and only thirty seats. Great for us diners because we know chef Cory Vitiello (formerly at the Drake Hotel) is going to be personally on our case. Vitiello is a star example of the way good cooking is evolving in Toronto. He has digested the random influences that enrich the city and fused them into a deceptively simple menu which limns unfamiliar combinations along with tastes that deftly complement each other.    more »

My name is Matt Bieber, and I work for Mobile Commons, the mobile vendor that supports Blue Ocean Institute’s Fish Phone program. Just wanted to alert you that consumers need to text their inquiries to 30644, not 30622.

What do you di if people start making out at the table?

This provocative question was put by New York Magazine's Grub Street to Michael Lombardozi of One If by Land Two if by Sea - reputedly the most romantic restaurant in New York.....

He replied:
"Recently there was an incident in the bathroom. It was a busy night, and this couple was gone for a good 25 minutes. We sent someone downstairs, and hey, look at that, there’s a party going on in there. I guess they were trying to have a baby.

I dash to the subway through the food court wearing a mask to avoid inhaling transfats. Then I 'm stopped in my tracks by a wonderful vintage ad for Delespaul-Havez chocolate. It is right beside a brew of hot DH chocolate, darkly brown, tasting rich yet light, tunes of blackberry, hazelnut -YES!

Le Gourmand occupies a stall on the north side of the mall, and its enterprising young manager David Huyneh is turning it into a delicious patisserie. Star feature: the soggy not too sweet Shi Bu Ya chocolate cake made on site. Imports include melting custard and custard pear tarts, a crunchy raisin croissant, and Rahier's cakes. And more's to come....

went last week to Splendido to sample the cooking of Norman Laprise of Toque!, often said to be Montreal's best restaurant. I've never been there so I was looking forward to this dinner, part of Winterlicious' chef series, where Laprise would cook alongside David Lee.

Laprise was a surprise, he's really out there with his cooking.While Lee is all suavity, Laprise assaults the senses. His first fusillade was a ceviche of two Princess scallops (small Scottish mollusks) coated with fir foam and with a kind of pouch of clementine juice underneath. Great way to start. Lee countered with a smoothly delicious chunk o f lobster and uni sauce. Laprise's way with fresh foie gras was to pair it with pear juice and jelly. Lee cooked a squab breast sous vide with blood sausage and best of all chestnut agnolotti. I wish chestnuts were more often on the menu. The most interesting part of Laprise's plate of seared, poached venison loin (which was i thought was largely tasteless, no hint of game) was the crispy salad. His dessert prompted most of u s at the table to drop our spoons. White chocolate mousse with buckthorn berry flakes and sorbet was like a yogurt and grain breakfast! He's really a challenging chef. Would love to get to his restaurant.

We were seated at long tables, assorted strangers, -- an excellent idea because as we ate, we discovered a shared passion in food. Takes commitment to pay around 224 each for this special dinner The cost of the dinner was $149 plus paired wines , $75. I kept learning more and more about food from my neighbours who I felt were way ahead of me. One young couple spend weeks in Mexico each winter and have discovered the perfect mole! A Quebecois foodie said it was his Jewish wife who made the best tourtiere - they were a guide to Quebec. My immediate neighbour, a tax lawyer, loved wine and she was disappointed with the selection of Ontario wines - but I guess that is part of the Winterlicious deal.

We all loved the Swiss Vacherin Mont D'or with shaved black truffles that was spooned out of a large round that had lait cru stamped on it. Vacherin Mont d'Or is only made from winter milks, October through March, and it is aged encircled by a strip of fir --- once ripe, you must eat it with a spoon. The big round box had lait cru stamped on it but when I checked the Provincial Fine Cheese website, I found that it was "thermise" which is pasteurization lite. "Thermise" is now the way many soft cheeses are being made so they will age at 60 days and thus be legal in North America. But alas, the texture and taste is different, the cheese doesn't gush like Vesuvius and there is no inner burning sensation. Of course for anyone eating a Vacherin for the first time these qualities won't be missed -- still it's sad theyre going. I think the cheese that suffers most from thermise is Epoisses. It's now practically impossible to find a true Lait Cru Epoisses in town.

http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/shopping-for-fish/index.html?hp

Mark Bittman has great advice for the ethical fish buyer..."you’re standing at a fish counter, staring at a piece of fish. You can text Blue Ocean’s Fishphone at 30644 with the message FISH and the name of the fish in question. Immediately you’ll get a text back with an assessment and, when appropriate, a more environmentally sound alternative.

If you put in sea bass, for example, you would get a message back saying, “Black sea bass; U.S. Mid Atlantic (GREEN) few environmental concerns, strong management has helped populations recover from overfishing.”

Green means green light, of course.

And the system is pretty smart. Try “halibut” and you get

Pacific Halibut
(GREEN) few environmental concerns
MSC certified as sustainable;
Atlantic halibut
(RED) significant environmental concerns

“MSC” means that the species has been certified as a “best environmental choice” by the Marine Stewardship Council (www.msc.org).

After seeing Alice Waters on the Charlie Rose show (go to his website) I wondered whether eating organic for so long hasn't put her on tranks. She appeared to be in a trance, simpering like a Helen Hokinson clubwoman (see Club Women can Cook Too) and I don't think her smile would pass the fresh'n'local test, it came and went as regularly as a traffic light. She clung to her mantra "taste" but she never defined taste for us, simply applying it across the board to all organic food. She never eats tasty things like preserved food or food with additives or anything that isn't organic and she travels with her own organic lunchpack. And she hasn't cooked at her resto Chez Panisse for 24 years.

The funniest moment was when she wanted to buy locally grown pears in NYC in February!

Charlie Rose tried hard to energize her but with zilch results. He offered a refreshing perspective to the overwrought sanctimony of the fresh'n'local movement. He'd never heard of Slow Food and I don't think he knew much about Alice before his producer booked her.

Some of the comments on the show...
Comment by Jan Brown on Friday, Feb 8 at 10:52 AM

I too, was struck by Water's wanting to buy locally grown pears in NYC in February, and turned the show off.

Comment by eileen on Thursday, Feb 7 at 03:17 AM

yes! yes! yes! so wonderful to see alice waters :: dear soul :: and charlie's bewilderment at the powerful integrity of her message :: education, agriculture, cultural values :: health and happiness :: the children, the future :: and your health too charlie :: a lovely evening :: may it grow :: slow and slow :: breathe :: mangia mangia ! xo

Comment by N. Sarah on Friday, Feb 8 at 10:06 AM

I watched the interview with disappointment and disbelief at Water's vocal delivery, mannerisms, and anecdotes of her own sanctimonious lifestyle. It appears that over the course of the past 30+ years she's deified herself into a saint for the environment and savior of our nation's food "values". I wouldn't want her as my spokeswoman for eating better and "greener"; she was totally uninspiring and out of touch with the climatic realities which face local growers (and consumers) outside of sunny California. As a New England native, when I ask myself where my olives, lemons and oranges come from, the answer which comes to mind is "a place a heck of a lot warmer than here". Bless my Massachusetts apples and Maine potatoes! I will vow to do my part to help the environment though, and save a few trees by forgoing purchasing her 415-page hardcover cookbook. I shall put the $35 towards my vegetable garden, groove all summer on the joy of tending to the plants and watching them grow, and continue to "value" my food experience by canning/freezing my harvest for the winter months. I don't need an expert or a 2-pound cookbook to tell me the tomatoes from my own backyard will taste better than the pale "organic" ones from the store, and that the strawberries in N.E. grocery stores in February probably won't have much flavor.

If it’s deep winter, it must be Winterlicious. This resto promotion, along with Summerlicious, was started by the city in 2003 to combat the post-Sars slump and seasonal doldrums. It sounded, as so many government initiatives do, patronizing, as if the restos on their own have trouble hacking it (Of course if government didn’t overtax restaurants, control wine, etc. restaurants would do much better!)

Even so the idea of a $35 dinner at a place where the bill usually went north of $100 was peachy, but realistically I knew there was no free lunch. Sure enough, the noise was often negative. A couple of years ago I was taken to a restaurant where we ate the ordinary menu but the service was lousy because the owner complained he was overwhelmed by Winterlicious patrons. As if they were on welfare. That’s how some Winterlicious patrons were and still are made to feel, and some restaurants are serving lesser food and smaller portions.


So when a pal actually called me on his cell phone from Oro and said “You can’t miss this twenty buck lunch” I sat up. And the mails kept coming even from my editor who, after visits to Boba and the Globe Bistro, asked why couldn’t she eat like this all the time? These restos aren’t offering inferior food at all, they are simply charging less.    more »

The creepy-crawlies

History: About 340 years ago, an English physician, philosopher, and collector of odd things, Sir Thomas Browne, described a strange illness he had apparently encountered years earlier in children in Languedoc, a region in the southeast corner of France. The illness began with coughs and convulsions—symptoms which resolved, Browne said, when "harsh" (coarse?) hairs appeared on the backs of the sufferers. The only other thing Browne related about this disease was its name—Morgellons.

Condition: Morgellons, or at least a condition given the same name, has now reappeared, in the form of an illness in which sufferers are tormented by the sensation that bugs are crawling under their skin. This is accompanied by itching, as well as the sense of being stung or bitten. Many sufferers find relief by scratching or picking. What binds this new condition to Browne's description is the appearance of red, blue, or black fibers or granules in the picked skin. Sometimes, when doctors examine under high magnification the sites of sensations, similar fibers are seen embedded below the skin's surface.

Effect: Morgellons disease makes people miserable.

Go to www.slate.com/id/2183153/ for article....

England's always been famous for Nannies but isn't Waitrose supermarket going too far?

Waitrose is the supermarket for the rich and self-righteous, the champagne socialists. I scan the latest glossy issue and marvel at its PC. It s come out top in the latest Marine Conservation Society (MCS) League Table for sourcing fish from responsibly managed fisheries... It's a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm oil, a global mutl-stakeholder forum set up to encourage the sustainable production and use of palm oil...

And to hell with those Kenyan farmers who're getting a fair price for their coffee while British farmers struggle to make a living. To hell in fact with globalism and free trade!

What about the Great Satan - scientific advances? You guessed it. No genetically modified food is sold under the Waitrose label and other labels must specify whether GM ingredients are included. Gosh, one must spend lots of time reading the small print in Waitrose stores.

How's Whole Foods, the US ethical giant, which opened last June in London, doing? No reports in yet but the competition it faces in London's hotly contested market is substantial. Customers are targeted by income, race, age, habits, ethics....

the top contenders..

Waitrose is the pick of "symbols of success", affluent educated shoppers with conscience. It has the top online delivery service Ocado which attracts "urban colonists." Sainsbury has a broader reach, SS plus "urban intelligence" DINKs, double income no kids...Jamie Oliver has a halfmillion (cdn) job puffing the shop. An interviewer asked a shopper earning $40 (cdn) a year whether Jamie Oliver, a mockney Herbert doesn't put her off shopping there. "Not at all. He lives a good life. He's cool. So am I."

Old faces like Marks and Spencer (still the best sandwiches) pull SS and"urban intelligence" and "happy families" but put off "municipal dependency" archetypes"...

Tesco, the most popular market, relies on "happy families" but "SS" don't shun it, perhaps because Tesco has good wine online. Safeway is for "rural isolationists" who hate the city. Good on 'em.

Love to see how Toronto supermarkets would rate.....

Full report at Times Online

Why long-haul food may be greener that local food with low air-miles

Food miles were pushed by a '90s advocacy group as a major enviro concern - more food was travelling as supermarkets tightened their hold on the distribution of food. Food was being trucked to a central depot then trucked again to local markets.

Even so, the food mad media started screaming that it was the world travelling food that was making a hole in the ozone over the north pole.

But wait a minute.

At a conference last month on the economics of food, Chris Foster of Manchester Business School presented some startling conclusions from a review of the evidence.

The biggest environmental impact of many food products, he said, came from their production. Bulk transport by land or sea was of “low significance”. And he suggested that policy-makers should “critically unpick the ‘local food’ agenda”.


Foster points out that local production and a distribution system involving lots of vans and cars miss the environmental benefits of economies of scale.

Just over a ton of goods moved six miles as part of a 22-ton lorry load generates about 14oz of CO2; moved in 50 cars, each carrying 40lb, it generates about 22lb. (Incidentally, the customers driving to and fro markets are among the biggest generators of CO2 in Britain so think of the impact of North American drivers going to market.)

Researchers now prefer what they call the “life cycle assessment” (LCA) of food products - the environmental impact from farm to fork. The results are often counter-intuitive. Tomatoes grown in the natural heat of Spain have less “global warming potential” (GWP) than out-of-season British tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses.

As well, researchers in New Zealand claim that antipodean lamb and apples use less energy – even after being transported 12,000 miles – than the same products from Britain. A study by Lincoln University in New Zealand compared the use of fuel, electricity, pesticides, fodder, transportation, storage and other items and calculated that a ton of New Zealand apples generated the equivalent of 407lb of CO2 compared with almost 600lb for UK apples.

The difference was even more marked in lamb. The study claimed that a ton of New Zealand lamb carcass generated more than half a ton of compared with about three tons for British lamb. Much of the huge CO2 disparity was down to the use of electricity and fertiliser in rearing the British lambs.

Peter Gordon, a New Zealand chef who runs Providores restaurant in Marylebone, central London, believes that such considerations justify using imported products. “We source lamb from New Zealand as well as Wales. Food miles is a great term, but in reality the big issue is sustainability,” he says. “Consumers will look at a pineapple from Ghana and won’t buy it because it has terrible food miles. But the Ghanaian farmer has a tiny carbon footprint.”

Jetting food does gobble carbon miles - but very little food is flown.

in Britain: Gordon Ramsay's restos are places where you pay 400 canadian for three courses. But now Ramsey's joining the casual trend and plans a series of $60 canadian gastro pubs featuring such english comfort food as lamb stew, steak and kidney pie, grilled mackerel....

From today's Guardian...

Red tape has ended the annual pancake race in the North Yorkshire city of Ripon.

The race, which sees a team of choristers and often portly clerics take on the pride of the town's school and businesses, goes back - with regular interruptions - to pre-medieval times. Its origins are supposed to lie in a Saxon trick played on invading Danes, who accepted alcohol-drenched pancakes from local women who then stabbed them to death while they slept.

"Sadly, we've looked at things very carefully this year and decided that it can't take place," said the current dean, and race co-organiser, the Very Rev Keith Jukes. "The big reason is healthy and safety.

"Any organisation which runs an event like this has to go through a number of risk assessments. The insurance companies demand it and in the end you have to work out whether it's a risk you can take.

"It puts people off helping. It's just one thing after another."

The sun’s high scattering the clouds, the seas are rolling and the crew is hoisting the flapping sails of the 100-foot wooden schooner Friendship Rose as she starts the 8 mile trip from Bequia to Mustique. These little lumps of the Grenadine islands, 32 cays of extinct volcanoes, are battered by both the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea which at the turn of the tide can transform channels into surging torrents. Already I can feel the boat bouncing on the waves as I lie leeside enjoying the occasional ocean splash. I can’t believe it: there are no jetskis! Jetskis are banned in the Grenadines.   more »

You can take Brad Moore out of College Street but can you take College Street out of Brad Moore?

Brad Moore: an imaginative fashionista chef who opened Indian-inspired Xacutti a few years ago. The menu read seductively with spice-lite dishes such as Indo-Thai prawns in lime-mint coconut curry spice. yam fries with soy-chili sambola, spinach kofta..But Moore’s commitment to cooking was overwhelmed by the College St aesthetic – a hip, noisy bar scene and on Sundays, the ur brunch, a meal that isn’t a meal at all but a sugar/starch blowout leading to severe carbover.

So when I heard Moore was opening a new place, Eleven at Jarvis and Front, I wondered whether he’d found the faith and was going to take spice seriously.   more »

Low prices force farmers to give up on cauliflowers

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Cauliflower is the latest British vegetable to be priced off the dinner table   more »