Category: Food

CSPI Calls For Banning 8 Foos Dyes

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The dyes that the Center for Science in the Public Interest wants banned are, “Yellow 5, Red 40, Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Orange B, Red 3, and Yellow 6.”

The CSPI is claiming that they have a link to ADHD and behavioral problems in children, though I think the science is pretty thin.

Normally, this is something I wouldn’t notice, but Yellow 5 is an asthma trigger for a lot of people, including Sharon,*, so I’m constantly looking for it when shopping.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

The New McScarfyism*

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It started innocently enough, with an ad from Dunkin’ Donuts:

Rachael Ray, who gets pictured eating in so many places that I expect the Phoenix Mars lander to snap a picture, doing an add for Dunkin’ Donuts frozen drinks.

Notice the paisley silk scarf? So did Michelle Malkin (sorry, no link to her, ever), and she claimed that it was the Arab headdress known as the Keffiyeh, and that Dunkin Donuts was “hate couture”, and an endorsement of Jihad.

Well, the donut and coffee purveyor, did not do the sane thing, which would be to suggest that Malkin needs her meds adjusted, but pulled the ad and issued an apology, once again showing how American business capitulates to Jihadists.

Why am I calling Malkin a Jihadist? Let’s compare Ray and run the numbers:

  1. Woman’s parents were born and raised in the country which has had the longest Islamist insurgency, the Phillipines?
  2. Woman born in the United States to parents who were not legal residents at the time, giving them a leg up in getting their green card, aka the, according to Malkin, an “Anchor Baby”.
  3. Uses threats and intimidation against perceived enemies, including the publication of names and addresses.
  4. Wears a Keffiyeh.

It’s pretty clear to me which one is a Jihadist.

In any case, I am now boycotting Dunkin Donuts for capitulating to a terrorist.

*Credit where credit is due. I did not come up with this term. Tritumi at SP gets credit for this.

Food Crisis Update

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I guess the part of the story we expect is this:

The rising prices are “threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger,” Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Program, said on the agency’s Web site Tuesday.

Foreign starvation, hand wringing over biofuels, etc.

Nothing to worry about here, we’re Americans…right???

WRONG

We are seeing severe shortages of rye flour, with no domestic supplies being available around July, and there are currently only 27 days wheat supply.

Additionally, we are seeing panic buying, which is forcing big box retailers to restrict bulk purchases of rice, so that they don’t run out.

We already have hunger in the US, just look at our overburdened food pantries, and it is going to get worse.

Off till Monday Evening

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Shabbos is coming up, followed by the two Yom Tovim for the first two days of Pesach, and since my Orthodox mother-in-law is here for the holidays, no use of computers…or cars…or light switches for the duration.

That being said, let me give both of my readers a piece of advice. If you take it, you will never regret it.

Buy kosher for Passover Coca Cola!

You can identify it by looking at the lid. They are typically yellow, though not always, but the non KFP stuff will simply have an OU on the lid (A U inside the O, a symbol of the Orthodox Union kosher cert), while the KFP stuff will have an OU-P on the lid (-P for Passover).

It is 100% cane sugar, none of that Corn Syrup crap.

Stock

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Well, this Friday, we finally had accumulated enough veal bones to make some stock.

I just got it done and into the freezer yesterday.

Took the bones, along with some onions and celery, and got it to a low simmer and kept it there for about 3 days.

Some notes on stock:

  • It’s easy to make, just low heat.
  • Do not add spices. Stock is a flavoring agent of its own, not a food. Stock with spices is “soup”.
  • You can add some onions and celery, and we do. The leafy bits of the celery, which one does not normally eat, is good for this.
  • Add the gristle. It has some flavor and the collagin adds a nice mouth feel and some flavor.
  • There is a trick to seeing if you have gotten all the “goodness” out of everything. Stock does not have much flavor at all unless you add salt, so take a spoonful, add a shake of salt to some stock in the spoon, and taste.
  • Finally, and most importantly, if you are freezing it, do it in small containers. Last time I did this, I had to use a hammer and screw driver to use some.

What you get will give you wonderful flavor and mouth feel for a sauce.

World Food Crisis Approaching

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Paul Krugman notes that we are in the middle of a major food crisis, with the prices of staples such as wheat, corn, and rice skyrocketing, and he blames, along with weather and energy prices, biofuels.

As he so eloquently states, “People are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states”.

It’s a nice sound bite, but it is incomplete, which may be an unfortunate fact of life when one has only about 800 words to put forth an idea.

Simply put, there is much more to this problem than simply the currently minuscule demand for feed stock for bio-fuels.

First, he misses the very real possibility of worries regarding social unrest, possibly to the level of failed nation states from food riots, that may very result from this, which may be far more lethal the direct starvation deaths.*

Major exporters, such as China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have introduced export restrictions to forestall this, which, of course, worsens the problem for net food importers.

More interisting is a Bloomberg article showing the problems in the market being akin to the current credit crisis. The reporting is mind boggling simple here telling , “Bad countries interfering with the free market by regulating their exports so that poor people don’t starve“, story.

The reality, and it can be teased out from the article, is that there is a lot of arbitrage generating volatility. The quotes are from rice traders, and they are wringing their hands. Let’s look at the various non-producing players in the market that were listed:

  • Pfaffikon, Switzerland-based Mother Earth Investments AG
  • Morgan Stanley Global Wealth Management
  • Singapore-based rice broker Hermes Investments Pte Ltd.
  • Padiberas Nasional Bhd.
  • Global Commodities Ltd. in Adelaide, Australia
  • Diapason Commodities Management SA

To the best of my knowledge, ot one of these companies owns a farm, nor processes the grain, they make their by extracting fees on trades, and while that can be useful to buy a contract for future delivery, the reckless Anglo-Saxon trading model that is at the core of the current credit crunch, where numerous people buy and sell contracts to generate trade profits is making things worse.

In fact, until we move back to depression era regulators to reign in this activity, it will continue to get worse.

*Yes, I’m looking at this cold blooded construct, and realizing that it means for many people the end of the world as they know it.

Cramming for My Drug Test

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Well, Purim starts Thursday night, and so Sharon*, got us our favorite hamentashen†.

Mine is mohn, a sweet poppy-seed filling, so I were I to have to pee in a cup in the next couple of days, I’m sure that I’d show metabolites of opiates right now.

Homey don’t do that stuff no more, though as to the use of legal intoxicants, such as that marvelous output of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, I’ll be doing some of that.

The rabbinic ruling on Purim is that one should drink enough that they confuse Hamen (the villain of the story) and Mordehai (the hero of the story), though I won’t be taking it that far.

In any case, my Sharon* will most certainly be driving.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†A three sided stuffed pastry eaten as a part of the celebration.

Referral Fees

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One of our close friends, and my XGF*, Debbie, is a lawyer going out on her own and starting her own practice in disabilities and education law.

My wife just referred one of her clients to her, as the situation has reached the point where a lawyer needs to be involved, rather than just an advocate.

By way of a thank you, Debbie baked us a pie.

Ohhhhh….pie!!!

*Ex-Girl Friend

Prison study to investigate link between junk food and violence

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Nope, this is not a punchline. It’s an actual study that they are conducting in the UK.

The university will lead the £1.4m study in which 1,000 males aged 16 to 21 from three young offenders’ institutions in England and Scotland will be randomly allocated either the vitamin-and-mineral supplements or a placebo, and followed over 12 months.

In a pilot study of 231 prisoners by the same researchers, published in 2002, violent incidents while in custody were cut by a more than a third among those given the supplements. Overall, offences recorded by the prison authorities fell by a quarter.

It certainly would explain the relatively high crime in the US.

We have effectively been giving borderline nutrition to the poor, and it shows up in crime statistics, just like Nixon’s removal of lead paint from the market correlates to the crime drop of the 1990s.

Diner Diving

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My job shop took me out to lunch and gave some schwag, a pencil cosy, pen, and sticky pad.

They also took me out to lunch at the Silver Diner.

I like diners, I find them to be a bit of an adventure, as opposed to chains, though this is a local chain with 20 restaurants in Maryland and Virginia.

I had a burger, and it was pretty good. The shoe string fries were very nice, maybe next time I’ll do onion rigs, and the coffee was good, in a “this is a diner, not a latte house” way, which is my preference.

Both the restaurant, and my job shop are recommended, and for the latter, I’d say that even if they hadn’t just fed me.

Culinary Adventures: Chicken and Seaweed

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We needed to make dinner, and my wife doubted that we had enough left over chicken to feed us all, but I had a solution.

We had a pack of udon noodles, so I got the water boiling for them, and put a about 3 cups of stock in a pot and started to boil it.

I took about 4 sheets of nori (Japanese sushi seaweed), shredded them, and put them in the stock, and brought it all to a simmer, then added the chicken and remaining gravy, some oriental vegetables (broccoli, snap peas, water chestnuts, etc.), and a few chicken wings from the freezer, which took no time at all in simmering broth..

Boiled the noodles for 8 minutes, and then rinsed with cold water to stop the cooking, and when the wings were good and done (even frozen, not that long), put the chicken and veggies on top of the udon.

The seaweed added a lot of umami* to the broth flavor, and even my son, who is a notoriously finicky eater† loved it.

*Umami, from the Japanese word or “meatiness” is the 5th flavor, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. The actual taste bud receptor, for glutamates present in animal proteins, was determined in 2002, though it has been a part of oriental cookery for centuties, and the great Brillat-Savarin‘s concept of osmazome a very similar concept of meat flavor.
†Finicky eating habits is a classic symptom of conditions on the Autism spectrum

Ag Department Approves Treatment to Make Meat Look Good Long After it is Rotten

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No, I am not joking.

The meat packers got permission to use Carbon Monoxide to keep meat looking fresh (it makes hemoglobin very red). It should be noted that they approved it as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, which meant that there was no public review.

FWIW, this technology is banned by banned by the European Union, Japan and Canada.

Here are some pictures:


God bless the George W. Bush Agricultural department.

Ok!!!! I’m Awake Now (And I Need a Change of Underwear)

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I had to fill up, and there is a 7-11 on the way to work, so I filled up there.

I filled up the car, but I decided that I needed hydration and caffeine, so I got myself a Coke® Slurpee®. It looked a trifle over frozen, so I stood as far back as I could while operating the machine.

I got everything working fairly well, when BLAMM!!!!, some sort of pressure surge hit, and ruptured the lid.

It sounded like an atom bomb had gone off, and everyone looked over. I was standing there with a stunned expression* on my face.

The lid was shredded, but remarkably enough, I had no Slurpee® on me…not a drop.

One of the clerks came to help me dispense, I think that they were grateful that there was no actual gun play tied with the noise, and she joked, “Need to go to the bathroom now?” I replied, “too late for that,” which got a chuckle out of her.

*My brother calls it the “looking like a cow that has just stepped on its own udder” expression.

Topps Meat Plant Cut Inspections Before Reall

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Is it any surprise that under the Bush administration’s policies of “self regulation”, that companies would abandon health and safety inspections?

In the months before issuing a massive recall of its frozen hamburgers, Topps Meat Co. curtailed testing of ground beef and skipped other safeguards aimed at preventing contaminated meat from reaching consumers, according to a published report Tuesday.

It may be safer to buy your meat as steaks, and grind it at home…At least then, you can be reasonably certain that you are not getting cow anus in the mix.

Alcohol Makes You Smarter

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At least that’s what a scientists at the University of Auckland, New Zealand have determined that, with rats at least, moderate alcohol consumption improves cognitive performance.

Given my behavior at Chabad-Lubovich* Simchat Torah† services a few days back, this would imply that I have a significant IQ bump for the next few days…or maybe not…the light boozers beat the tea-totaling rats, but they both beat the heavy boozers.

*An Orthodox Jewish outreach group.
†It celebrates the fact that we have finished Torah readings for the year, and we start back at the beginning. It’s traditional to consume mass quantities at this event.

Salad is Bad for You

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Or at least it is when you combine it with “self regulation”, because Dole has recalled 5,058 bags of salad mix.

More bad E Coli. Of note, a lot of this is literally bulls^%$, or at least cow waste, and these strains of E Coli are not natural for cows. It’s when we feed them a corn laden diet that their digestive tract was never designed to handle, their waste becomes hyper acidic, and this pathogen loves these conditions.

Sweet Spawn of Cthulhu!!!! It’s Real!!!!!!!

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Chocolate with bacon?
Tekeli-Li!!!!!! Tekeli-Li!!!!!!

Bacon Exotic Candy Bar – New

Applewood smoked bacon + Alder smoked salt + deep milk chocolate

Deep milk chocolate coats your mouth and leads to the crunch of smoked bacon pieces. Surprise your mouth with the smoked salt and sweet milk chocolate combination.

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it–chocolate.
–Katrina

Shelf Life: 3 months
Gluten free
41% cacao, 3oz.

This is just wrong.