January 18, 2007
Hot Sake - Food News You Can Use
- Outsourcing is coming to a high-end restaurant near you, and no we are not talking about phone reservationists working abroad who do not understand that a 5:45 reservation is unacceptable to you.
- Florence Fabricant has the official word in this weeks "Off the Menu" on Back Forty, the upcoming casual spot from Savoy owner Peter Hoffman, which we first told you about in the fall. Located in the old Radio Perfecto space with a casual menu and well curated beverages, it will be a very welcome addition to the neighborhood.
- If you are feeling WAY more adventurous than most of the people religiously hitting the gym to work off their extra holiday pounds may we suggest the following. Get one of these specially priced full quarter Berkshire hogs from Heritage Foods and see how many dishes you can make from almost 40 pounds of various pig parts. At about $6.25 a pound it sure beats Key Food type shopping if you have a medium to big freezer, and a whole bunch of hungry friends. Start a blog based on the buy if you wish, could be fun. They also have other breeds of pig available, Red Wattle is particularly good.
- Sticking to the high road of food production and consumption, Dan Barber’s NYT op-ed from last week is certainly worth a belated read if you missed it.
- In the above linked op-ed Dan is 100% correct about the carrots, on the other end of the carrot knowledge spectrum are those who actually think baby carrots sold by the bag in supermarkets are actually a small variety of carrot. Please go see Alex and Linda Paffenroth at the greenmarket if you want to know what a real small variety of carrot would taste like - assuming they still have a few thumbelina carrots around.
- From the Bay area comes a Spanish cuisine overview.
- While talking about Spain let’s grab a pit stop, via this article and the short video goof, in the world of advanced ingredient/technique cooking - apparently “molecular gastronomy” is on the way to becoming a bastardized term….say like.....“foodie.” A bit of a surprise that some of the better-cooking-through-chemistry many of us want to try today at adventurous spots around the world has deep roots to our childhood favorites.
- Hot on the heels of his Saveur 100 appearance, our own Famous Fat Dave is next the latest friend of food to be “Grilled” over at AHT. Congrats on both counts Dave.
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dan barber does not seem to understand why agribusiness get all the breaks. there's a reason why lobbyists work and why big corporations use them. Like he mentioned, Archer Daniel Midland (ADM) and their peers will push for higher subsidies on corn and soy because they can use ground up corn + soy as feed.
the other problem with his argument is that he makes the assumption that independent farmers will be better than agribusiness farms.
let us pretend farm subsidies disappear. prices for things like purdue chicken (I'll call this Bad Food) go up to a point where prices are close enough and people can be swayed by tags like "no antibiotics" and "sustainable farming." (I'll call this Good Food.) Greater demand for the superior product will drive up the prices of Good Food vs. Bad Food.
When potential small independent farmers see the higher prices for Good Food, more will enter the market. At this point, you can no longer account for the new producers of Good Food.
All all small independent farmers of the same quality? Why does a fine dining restaurant use one purveyor versus another?
The other thing that might happen is that an original independent farmer of Good Food will expand his operations because prices have gone up (thus gross revenue and gross profit).
Can you safely say that current independent farmers who grow Good Food (sustainable, environmentally sound, etc), can maintain the same level of excellence at 2x, 4x, 8x the size?