This (from Radar’s very funny “Hype Report” edition):

His comments are great as well.

Check out What the World Eats: a  pictographic essay from Time showing all the food consumed by families from around the world in a week.  Some of the worst stereotypes are confirmed (check out the German’s beer bottles) and the variation in cost is huge (from $5 to $500).  Fascinating stuff.  Sadly, no Australian family though.

… to your health, at least on American Airlines. I was flying from Seattle to Atlanta the other day, and I didn’t have time to get any food during the brief stopover in Dallas. So naturally, I was starving by the time I got on the plane for the second leg. Just a little snack was all I needed to tide me over until I got to the hotel, but American has stopped serving ANY food on the flight, not even peanuts with your drink.

You can buy a “snack” though, for $3. The only options are: cookie, chips, and M&M’s. (My flight back also offered trail mix, but I don’t think they had any at this time.) Hoping for something with oatmeal I can at least pretend is a little bit healthy, I choose the cookie. It’s a sugar-covered snickerdoodle monstrosity the size of a salad plate. I hate snickerdoodle. I send it back, and resort to asking for chips. At least I know I like chips.

Instead of the standard bag’o'chips, it’s a blue plastic canister the size of a can of tennis balls. Think Pringles crossed with a Big Gulp. It’s a huge can of Lays Stax or Flax or something. They’re vile. But I’m starving, so I eat a few of them, barely making a dent in the stack.

There’s nowhere to put this huge container as I’m cramped here in the middle seat, so I try and get the attention of the stewardess to give them back. (I probably ate 10 chips, making that snack 30 cents a chip. Yay.) While I’m waiting, I read the nutrition label. This “snack” they’ve handed out contains NINE HUNDRED calories. That’s HALF the daily calorie intake of most people. But at least, as the huge label on the front tells me, it has NO TRANS FATS and 20% LESS FAT THAN OTHER CHIPS. Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel better.

Next time I’m flying Alaskan.

While I know ALL of us will disagree with the statement that “there’s only so much you can do with a pork belly,” I have to say I agree with the overall thrust of this New York Magazine article. I think he misses the larger point, that New York’s continuing transformation into an amusement park (to be sure, the world’s most expensive amusement park) is a big part of the problem. New York is losing out to Las Vegas because it is trying to play Las Vegas’ game — and when you play Vegas, the house always wins.

I, for one, absolutely believe that Seattle is far ahead of New York — on a per capita basis at least. As I have said many times, I would not trade Seattle for New York. (London, though… that might be another story!)

If you’ve not seen Finding Nemo, you don’t know the hilarious scene where the sharks get together for something akin to Seafood Eaters Anonymous. “I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food,” they state, with great earnestness. It all comes apart because, duh, they’re sharks, hello.

Fast forward to Fish Wednesday. Readers of my Nerd’s Eye View blog will know that Fish Wednesday happens pretty regularly around our house, if not quite weekly. About a month ago, I started wondering where my fish was coming from. I get my veggies from a CSA, why was I getting my fish from the Safeway? Was there a better way to buy fish and did it matter where it came from?

Also, hey, while I’m at it, I thought, this is a good story for a food magazine. I pitched it to an editor I’ve written for and she accepted the idea. A little research will go a long way and I’ll be able to sit down and write a nice 1200 word piece. It turns out these are very big questions, dammit. I have been hoping for a simple sort of answer, some easy rules that will assuage my conscience and keep a nice plate of fish in front of me. The whole thing is quite a bit more difficult than anticipated.

Last week we visited with Mike McDermid who runs the Ocean Wise program out of the Vancouver Aquarium. And this week, we spent some time with Mark Plunkett who’s the conservation guy at the Seattle Aquarium. While I certainly feel much more educated as a consumer, I don’t feel like I’ve come to any easy conclusions.

There are a couple of basic things I can put my hand on, and for now, they’ll have to do. Step away from the Tiger Prawns, sorry, but put the crustacean down. Don’t touch that Chilean Sea Bass, no matter how gorgeously it’s marinated in wasabi and sake. (Argh!) No Orange Roughy, no farmed Atlantic Salmon.

I have a ton more reading to do. I’d like to talk to the guy at the fish counter at our neighborhood “green” market, I’d like to get in touch with the folks that buy seafood for our neighborhood not so green market, and I need to spend some time on the Seafood Choices Alliance web site.

I told our kind host at the aquarium that I felt like the story was starting to unravel for me. It wasn’t so much that it’s coming apart, it’s just that I’ve opened the proverbial can of worms. (Heh. For fishing. Get it? Heh.) When you start to ask where your food comes from, you unleash a whole lot of other questions that you hadn’t previously anticipated.

I find it both fascinating and frustrating. Frustrating in that I feel I can’t just sit down and hammer out my tidy little essay about sustainable seafood. And fascinating in that the avenues to explore are unlimited. I’ve not yet been to an oyster farm, talked to a fisherman or a chef, visited a seafood distribution hub… Dammit, it’s just supposed to be Fish Wednesday, not a master’s thesis.

Give a woman a fish and she’ll cook it, photograph it, and serve it up on Fish Wednesday. Ask a woman about a fish and she’ll embark on a Hemingwayesque journey to find out where the fish came from, what impact eating that fish has on the environment, whether or not it’s okay to eat the fish in the first place, and any number of as of yet unasked questions.

You can tuna fish, but you can’t just ask about it and expect an easy answer. Stay, um, tuned.

No, it’s not a joke. My post about Soup Swap was picked up at BlogHer, where it was found by the soup loving goddesses of The Gracious Bowl, a DC blog about, yes, SOUP. Inspired by our soupy goodness, they decided to host their own. Meanwhile, in Boston, the Wooden Spoon of Power was passed along to a new Master of Soup Ceremony. All these events converged, emails were exchanged, and National Soup Swap Day was declared.

The Soup Swappers of Boston, Washington DC, and Seattle encourage YOU to host a soup swap in your town on January 23rd, making this a craze that sweeps the nation. And, so there’s soup for those that might not get the chance to have some, please add a canned soup drive for a local shelter to your soup swap party, courtesy of the thoughtful ladies of The Gracious Bowl.

If you want to know how to host a soup swap, there are general guidelines here. If you do host a January 23rd soup swap, please drop me a line so I can let the other soup swappers know who’s participating and add your city to the press release. And you, you overseas people? You know who you are. We’d love to be able to call it International Soup Swap day, so if you can round up your neighbors and get them in on the swapping, do let me know.

Swap on!

Reports are coming in that the FDA has banned import of Vegemite, even going so far as to stop and search Australian tourists at the border to relieve them of their yeast-extract goodness. Clearly the FDA has their priorities straight, protecting the US from a product that no American will eat. (Lord knows, I’ve tried to make Jay eat it.) Fortunately, I have enough supply of my favoured hangover cure for at least the next couple of years. I have one jar I’ve had since I first moved here (expiration date: October 2004) and another full jar I haven’t opened yet. Fortunately, the stuff never goes off, and you only use a minute amount at a time.

October 23. Only the cool kats in Seattle will be there.

And you-know-who is going to be making dessert.

“Eclectician” at Off the Bone is doing the Carnival of Modern Man thing with a level of culinary dedication that is, well, manly. While good friends may recall a certain project that involved “ten pounds of salsa,” this guy cooked 15 pounds of pork for his wedding.

I’m making pork confit, then layering it with duck livers for terrine. Making confit takes 2 days if you’re rendering the fat yourself, the terrine takes another. And yes, doing this makes me feel manly.

It’s not merely the huge piles of meat and fat, nor even the sweetly animal smell that permeates my Brooklyn shoebox after rendering three gallons of lard. It’s that my fiancée thinks I’m crazy for doing this. It’s that I’m doing this at home, in a kitchen far too small for a project this size. It’s the sentiment of “damnit, I will feed the people who come to my wedding, with my own two hands.” But on some level, I’m doing it because I woke up one morning and said to myself, “I’m making terrines for the wedding,” and the thought made something in me growl contentedly. And it is, sad to say, at least partly the joy of being stupid that’s made this project so much fun.

Cooking seems to be one of those activities whose polarity seems to flip unpredictably between the masculine and the feminine. Perhaps it’s only when it’s a “mother feeding her family” scenario is it truly feminine, or perhaps it’s just sugar shock from the Era of Betty Crocker that makes me think that. Whatever gender we give it, I do know that there’s nothing more powerful than that primal maternal feeding instinct. Eclectician seems to hit on something I might label “Atlas Shrugged in the Kitchen”–the hypermasculine theater of culinary triumphalism that says “I must cook this pig today!” Or perhaps more aptly, “me fight pig me win.” I’m thrilled that this impulse has been translated, through the miracle of the democratization of haute cuisine, into “je dois faire les terrine pour le mariage.”

Whatever the language, that’s butch. And as far as I’m concerned, hot. Mrs. Eclectrician is a lucky gal–if I’m allowed to make such comments at the Carnival.

Technorati tag: modern man

For those of you who missed Paulette and Matt’s fabulous housewarming party last weekend, enjoy the pictures. What a pretty bunch of people! If only I could post the food for you to enjoy as well!