Jamie Oliver believes that women should abstain from sex with their husbands or boyfriends to punish them if they refuse to cook.

“Men are driven by sex,” the celebrity chef said this weekend at the annual Hay-on-Wye festival. “So the best way for women to get their men into the kitchen would be to stop having sex with them until they start to  cook.

 Chef Gordon Ramsay wants restaurants to be forced to serve only in-season fruits and vegetables of be fined. In a BBC 5 interview he said  he wants chefs to use home-grown produce only, not Kenyan strawberries in March for example.

IT's LSD for taste buds, it's a trip for sweetaholics, it's an innocuous looking red African berry synsepalum dulcificum that makes everything you eat with it taste sweet. Sour lemons become sweet lemonade, lime slices turn to candy, goat cheese tastes as if it is "powdered sugar" and "cheesecake" and Guinness turns into a murky milkshake.  

The miracle berry was first scouted as a new fake sugar in the seventies. But it's difficult to extract miraculin from the berries and purify it. Its future seems to lie in changing the taste of food itself -- scientists are experimenting with genetically modified miraculin tomatoes.

And it could upstage avant garde chefs who are struggling to achieve way out wacko flavours.

But the berry's true vocation is a trip. According to today's Gawker "Internet-savvy hipsters flock to Long Island City rooftop parties where a dealer/ guru named "Supreme Commander" hands them crazy berries to chew on, sending them into blissful fits of uncontrolled food-sampling.

     At his first party,,,  in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

    "You kept hearing 'oh, oh, oh,' " ... and then the guests became "literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table."

    "It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup."

Marc Lepine of Ottawa's new restaurant Atelier says " I ordered a pack of the freeze-dried version from the UK.   My staff and I are going to play around with it a little.  I can see at the end of a meal serving it with some unusual 'dessert' ingredients. "

To BUY -- Go to MiracleFruitman-Curtis Mozie

I posted a new photo to newfruit.

There's a funny piece in the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rooster25-2008may25,0,4480585.storyabout how an Hispanic neighbourhood is turning into a barnyard -- and not everybody's pleased-

"The crowing -- and bleating, quacking, honking, oinking and neighing -- has been a growing source of irritation, with callers lighting up city phone lines demanding that officials do something" writes the Times.  

Particularly about the Cockadoodle doo! Tony Johnson, who lives in Southeast L.A..... has fantasized about silencing the birds permanently. "Boom. Boom. Boom," he said, pantomiming how he would do it.

 "I can't sleep," said Perry Partee, 55, who lives near Watts. He sternly dismissed the conventional wisdom that roosters crow at dawn; in fact, he said, they often get going much earlier.

I found an NYT report from September 14, 1904, about the art of cock crowing -- in France, the best crowers were considered to make the hens lay better, and cocks were being trained to crow effectively.  The cocks were kept in covered cages, the covers whipped off once a day to ensure a burst of long sustained arias.

Complaints about cocks' lousy timekeeping miss the point. According to the Aberdeen Bestiary, the cock's crow has a message.  Cocks crow loudest in the darkest hours of the night and thus "evoke the terrors of eternal judgement at the top of their voice" and only when "they realize that the light of truth is already present in the hearts of their listeners" do they crow less forcefully.

Just what we need: one more moral arbiter.

Here' s Didier Duran of Cyrano's Bistro with his pet duck Nicolai....


Old news now but still significant - on May 14 the Chicago City Council led by Mayor Daley struck down the ordinance banning foie gras in city restaurants. The Mayor said that he didn't think the city should be saying what people should be eating -- Hear Hear.

Much was made of the fact that star chef Charlie Trotter inspired the ban because he didn't serve foie gras in his restaurant.  Now however he says he was never in favour of the ban. Why didn't he say so then?

Fresh'n'Local is ever so posh in Britain. First it was the Duchess of Devonshire's farm shop, then the Prince of Wales' farm shop and now it's Lady Bamford's Daylesford Organic. Lady Bamford, a multimillionaire's wife, has leapfrogged over her rivals by taking her brand and  her organic produce  to London.  Her newest outlet is in chic Pimlico, a croissant's throw from Sloane Square, a three story cafe and emporium, with a private dining room in the basement next to the "loos". The walls are marble throughout. Nobody has exploited the organic brand so unabashedly - and the original greens are calling her Martha Stewart with a title and organic for WAGs -- the shopaholic wives and girlfriends of the millionaire soccer players who don't just buy organic food but even more important the ORGANIC LIFESTYLE, cosmetics etc.....

Food Report: the wild mushroom risotto $26 was ok, the scrambled eggs were left on the hot plate too long -  the Epoisses cost about $22 and was definitely thermise and the DAylesford organic blood orange marmelade was as bland as guava jelly.  But the weather was gorgeous and made sidewalk sitting a delight..



                                                                 
Right next to Daylesford is the Saturday Pimlico Farmers' Market where you can buy nice fat Dover Soles for the bargain price of 12 bucks. The fishmonger takes pains to educate the customers in how to cook a gurnard, a small red spiky fish which was going for less than $2.   Half a dozen organic free range eggs are going for around seven bucks...  And "then there's the organic hay for pets which is labelled "Not for Human Consumption" - after all you never know what Greens will eat.

It’s no fun eating green… Is Fresh’n’Local a con job, is organic faux? Has food been turned into an indigestible pot au feu simmered with cups of aggression. Last weekend, the Vegans held a parade in New York City with a woman dressed as a pig carrying a sign “I have no spare ribs” followed by a giant pink replica of a human colon with polyps and a dirty colostomy bag. It’s not enough that our world is fragmenting before us, now food is going to pieces too.   more »

I picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: an Eating Manifesto and thought oh great, a defense of foie gras and just when it needs it. Both Chicago and California have given in to animal activists and banned the luxuriant duck/goose liver that can turn the sternest ascetic into a voluptuary. Already four European countries have banned the supreme food and so, I should add, has the Prince of Wales. Philadelphia may be next.

But Pollan doesn’t give a fig for foie gras. He is no foodie. He is a political writer who has made food an emblem of what’s wrong with the industrial world where food is grown and sold for profit and little concern for our health and welfare. And he’s just one of a throng of critics who are making food a surrogate for everything they find rotten in our way of life. The public is  gobbling it up. Nutritionist Marion Nestle, the author “What to Eat” says “What I hear as I talk to people is this phenomenal sense of despair about their inability to do anything about climate change, or the disparity between rich and poor.” So they kick food.  

Wait a minute.

 What about the back story, why we eat at all? A huge chunk of human experience is being shorted. Once necessity is satisfied, we eat for pleasure. Food is memory, the rituals of dining are mnemonics for the high and lows of our emotional lives. Those of us who can eat out and love doing so feel our spirits rising at the crackle of a fresh starched tablecloth, the clink of wine glasses, the fragrance  of lamb slowly braised in a tagine, the shock and awe in confronting a black bean threaded on to a pine needle. The senses aroused by the sight, the fragrance, the taste of great cooking has become a rich literary subculture. Here is MFK Fisher confronting a cook’s genius in France.”Maybe it was boiled shoe…but by the time Madame got through with it, it was nourishing and full of heavenly flavor and so were all the other courses she wrung daily…from the third-rate shops of Dijon and her own ingenuity.”

Now an aspiring MFK can get her baptism in great cooking from an American chef. American chefs have achieved rock star status, replete with Michelin stars, and they’re not content with transforming boots but have embraced and encouraged the artisanal food movement, seeking out local suppliers of meat and veg, handmade cheeses, individual creameries.

Still, If I were a chef I’d be very afraid. Politically driven eating isn’t just a fad, it’s tapping into America’s conscience, Puritanism. The Puritans ate to live and industrial food was perfect for the ethos, cheap and quick. Pleasure had nothing to do with it. Of course there were those who crept out of church and bought Playboy, I mean Gourmet and licked their lips over the stapled rib eye.

But then along came Julia Child and delicious French cooking and a glorious interregnum followed with Americans basking in the sensual pleasure of food and wine  -  only interrupted by an occasional puritan burp. In 1977  Craig Claiborne of the New York Times, got carried away and dropped four grand on dinner at Chez Denis in Paris. Retribution was swift, Harriet Van Horne wrote in the New York Post “This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American’s sense of decency. It seems wrong, morally, aesthetically and in every other way.”

She’s Baaaaackkkkkk. Another very important American agreed with her. Alice Waters, as  Totemic as Julia Child, the organic growing evangelical who aroused nostalgie de la boue in the boomer breast. But soon she revealed her inner John Winthrop. Organic food’s real mission was to protest the evils of industrial food, inorganic chemicals, toxins, genetically modified ingredients which are a devil-driven shortcut to increasing our food supply.

The tipping point came when the organic evangelicals joined forces with eco warriors, health cops,nutritionists, animal activists to become a band of neo-puritans with formidable advocacy groups. The commentariat loved it. Food, once banished to the style aka women’s pages, is now public enemy No. l. It is killing us. Worse it is killing polar bears, and rain forests. Animals,fish cause kneejerk guilt. Avoir Dupois is sinful. No month goes by without a study, usually based on dodgy data, revealing that a favorite food is lethal.

Across the pond, neo-Puritanism is called food snobbery. After the food snob Prince Charles said that Big Macs should be banned, Three star chef Marco Pierre White defended his fellow restaurateur, saying McDonalds offers better food than most restaurants “Their eggs are free range and the beef is from Ireland..and they offer excellent value.” …
After watching Jamie Oliver sob over a battery hen’s carcass, acerb AA Gill snapped: “Animals are bred into humiliating, unnatural shapes … 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’ve improved eating.”

Hear, hear added the Queen. Delia Smith, Britain’s Julia Child, told the BBC that the taste of food mattered more than whether it was organic or environmentally friendly. She couldn’t get into the politics of food.  The poor and pensioners needed cheap battery chicken.She was skeptical about food miles. She loved fresh shelled peas from Kenya in the winter "I'm conscious there are people in Kenya getting employment and money to bring up their children."
Her new book How To Cheat At Cooking, how to make good food with any ingredients, has been hailed “…looks like being one of those ground-breaking cookbooks that genuinely changes our whole attitude to food.”
Who wrote that? Delicious irony. William Sitwell is editor of the food snob glossy published by Waitrose supermarkets where all food is fresh,local,organic and labeled and $$$. So when he writes that Delia’s book declares an end to “food snobbery” he should know.

Tomorrow, Friday, Michael Schmidt goes on trial at Newmarket for selling raw milk to the public. Meanwhile the Queen is drinking raw milk at Windsor Castle without a qualm. She's done all right heading toward 90.  It is legal to sell raw milk in Britain, and in most US states and throughout Europe.

Free Michael Schmidt

It costs 17 bucks to buy this plate of unpeeled carrots whiskers and all at the luxury Hazelton Hotel's resto ONE.

What happened to cooking?