Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 60

weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• These cones were made for walkin: Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has created a line of shoes where the heel is decked out with a sparkly ice cream cone (right) or Brazilian plastic footwear brand Melissa. Another great find from fave blog Laughing Squid.

• NPR's On Point featured an interview with New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter on the problems of antibiotic use in livestock. The shocking out-take: as many people die of antibiotic-resistant superbugs in the US now as die of AIDS.

• And just to prove that it doesn't have to be that way, The New Pork Gospel is a loving profile by Barry Estabrook of Russ Kremer, the pig farmer that inspired Chipotle's commercial in praise of small pork producers.

• Here’s a project in Brazil that takes a different spin on the food truck concept: food trucks that, rather than selling food, are training people how to prepare food and manage their own culinary businesses (and maybe even their own food trucks!)

• The Beastie Boys' Mike D Runs a Free Food Truck in the Rockaway neighborhood of New York City, helping out residents hard-hit by Hurricane Sandy.

• For your weekend reading pleasure, we've found a new favorite food journal find in London-based The Gourmand. And it doesn't hurt that their logo looks a bit like the Pork Fairy.

• We will leave you with a few words of wisdom from Chef Thomas Keller on why it's desire and not passion that make the best cooks. "It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook...(more)"

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 51

weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• A household helper that looks like a mess: the melted ice cream cone door stopper (above).

• Truffle sex: "The black truffle has always been assumed to be a self-fertilizing fungus, but it's not..."

• One of the biggest obstacles to restaurants going green is food waste — hard to track and hard to fix. LeanPath software is trying to help. "When cooks put food waste on the LeanPath scale, they identify it and why they're throwing it away — like overcooked meat or spoiled fish. The software then calculates what that food waste is worth. With that information, a kitchen can figure out how it needs to change, Shakman says. (Watch a demo of how it works here.)"

• One way to combat food waste is the latest condiment trend: crumbs! Eleven Madison Park in New York City has elevated all the leftover seeds and salt that we all stick our finger into the bag to get into "everything bagel dust."

• It's a dark day for west coast oysters. The lease for Drakes Bay Oyster Co. in Northern California expires today. Why anyone would have a problem with an oyster farm we can't image. People, they clean the water.

• A couple of gems we ran across from the social media front: Are you sophisticated enough to "like" Grey Poupon on Facebook? It's a smarty pants campaign from food behemoth Kraft. And Waitrose supermarkets in the UK prove that tweaking on twitter is too fun to resist.  Waitrose Twitter hashtag was asking for trouble when it challenged tweeters to finish the sentence 'I shop at Waitrose because...' "One posted: "I shop at Waitrose because it makes me feel important and I absolutely detest being surrounded by poor people," and commented: "I also shop at Waitrose because I was once in the Holloway Road branch and heard a dad say 'Put the papaya down, Orlando!'" Either the masses are wittier than they thought or they know how to have fun with their image. It got our attention.

• Are You Sophisticated Enough to ‘Like’ Grey Poupon on Facebook?
  
  Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/17/are-you-sophisticated-enough-to-like-grey-poupon-on-facebook/#ixzz2DjymgFe5
  Are You Sophisticated Enough to ‘Like’ Grey Poupon on Facebook?
  
  Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/17/are-you-sophisticated-enough-to-like-grey-poupon-on-facebook/#ixzz2DjymgFe

Chefs Collaborative Chef Summit- 2012 Seattle

My-o-my, how time flies.  It seems like yesterday that we were all in New Orleans eating and drinking our way though another delicous Chefs Collaborative Chef Summit.  Well, time waits for no one, so here we are back from another Summit.  

Seattle rolled out the red carpet, or rather an amazing blue sky, to host a wonderful conference.  I know everyone loved sampling the incredible bounty that chefs enjoy up in the Pacific Nowthwest.  Enjoy our little recap of the Chefs Collaborative Summit 2012- in Seattle.

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 43

weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• A sense of whimsy decorates a bar called “Le Nid” (meaning the nest) in Nantes, France.

• Speaking off eggs, this is the most random (yet awesome) food trick — watch how you can separate eggs with a plastic bottle. We tried it ourselves.

• Food has always been part of diplomacy, but now American chefs are being tapped by the State Department as official culinary ambassadors. "The wide-ranging effort creates an American Chef Corps, a network of culinary leaders who could be deployed to promote U.S. cooking and agricultural products abroad."

• In a spirit of goodwill towards the American people, and beer enthusiasts everywhere, The White House has realeased its much-aniticpated home brewing recipes (complete with a video). Cheers!

• Smithsonian magazine takes a visual tour through the history of the lunchbox, from 19th tins to mid-20th century classics, like the Partridge Family and Lost in Space.

• There's nothing more mid-century than nuclear obsession. Cold War–Era Science Shows Beer Will Survive a Nuclear Apocalypse "In a world that had seen the potential of nuclear weaponry and that faced the threat of disaster as America and the U.S.S.R descended into the Cold War, a hierarchy developed around facts society might need to know about nuclear explosions. Number 32.2a on that list, apparently, was understanding 'The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages.' Specifically, beer. And soft drinks."

• Now lunch room politics is about more than choosing between Holly Hobby and Star Wars. In suburban Pittsburgh, students are taking to twitter to protest their low quality school food.

• Urbanization Puts Farms In Africa's Cities At Risk "The survey — which is the first of its kind — looked at city farming in 31 countries, where more than half of Africa's urban population lives. The authors say that governments need to integrate urban farming into city planning, or else the cities may lose one of their best sources of food."

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 34

 weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• Some of our favorite images from Pinterest this week, above. Come on by.

• Like so many coastal areas, fisherman are struggling in Southern California's Orange Country, highlighting the need to preserve culture as well as the natural world. Thanks to regulation in the name of conservation, these hard-working men face extinction: "The last people on earth who want an empty, fishless ocean are the people who make their living off fishing in the ocean."

• "Smart aquaponics" in Oakland, California at Kijani Grows is using tech in new ways: "Gardens that can communicate for themselves using the internet can lead to exchanging of ideas in ways that were not possible before. I can test, for instance, whether the same tomato grows better in Oakland or the Sahara Desert given the same conditions. Then I can share the same information with farmers in Iceland and China.”

• The New York Times OpEd Dirtying Up Our Diets argues that getting natural with microorganisms and unsanitized food might be just what the doctor ordered: "As we move deeper into a “postmodern” era of squeaky-clean food and hand sanitizers at every turn, we should probably hug our local farmers’ markets a little tighter. They may represent our only connection with some “old friends” we cannot afford to ignore."

• The title might be inflammatory, but soem interesting points are raised in the recent Salon article Eating Local Hurts the Planet. How your food is produced really, really matters. Shipping is just the part of the food system that we can see. "Not surprisingly, it turns out that food miles can only be taken at face value in the case of identical items produced simultaneously in the exact same physical conditions but in different locations — in other words, if everything else is equal, which is obviously never the case in the real world."

• The Practical Philosophy of Fish-Killing and The Ike-Jime Man explained for you by International Culinary Center instructor Dave Arnold. It's everything you ever wanted to know, and probably a bit more. (warning — an article for chefs or the otherwise sturdy)

• Chef Marcus Samuelsson talks about his memoir Yes, Chef and his life in the kitchen on the radio show Fresh Air (audio link).