a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food
- Rock your dinner with Bitchin'Kitchen and Nadia G. (above), and her new comedy cooking show, books and more.
- The latest entry in the "pornification" of stuff that everybody likes: grilled cheese porn. It's a whole gallery you can view at work.
- NPR confirms this week that trying to buy sustainable seafood as a home cook is still totally messed up and confusing.
- Pop-ups go super-glam as Chef René Redzepi sets up in the Claridges hotel in London during the Olympics.
- For a look into shifting climate, food and survival, watch the trailer for a new documentary film, People of a Feather: Life on thin ice, about the eider ducks of Nunavut. The Inuit rely on them for meat and their incredibly warm down, but like everything in the Arctic, it all depends on ice.
- Farmer/thought leader Joel Salatin wrote a response to The Myth of Sustainable Meat OpEd run by the New York Times April 12 which had many of us scratching our heads wondering how in the world the author came up with fantastic "facts" like pastured chickens have a bigger impact on global warming. Aside form debunking some of the nonsense, Salatin continued: "If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don’t have a prayer."
- Another topic that got a lot of chatter — dietary tribalism. "The back-and-forth mud-slinging between members of different "dietary tribes" troubles me most. I often imagine all the power that could be harnessed if we stopped and joined forces on some key issues: getting food dyes and trans fat out of our food supply, demanding that the presence of genetically modified organisms and artificial hormones be at the very least labeled on food items, reducing the presence of nutritionally empty foods in schools, facilitating access to healthy foods in "food deserts," constructing a healthier food system (from farmworker to field to table)."
- One Thing Missing from the Urban Farm Movement: Farmers. It turns out that growing food is really a lot of work. That's why it's a job worth paying for.
- Wander through the story of a lost food of New York City, Hungarian chestnut puree gesztenyepüré, and the immigrants who brought it.
