the GoodEater Collaborative

Sous-Vide Supreme Runs the Gauntlet

Reviews of the newly introduced SousVide Supreme—the $449 home version of the $1,000 machines that the world’s best restaurants have been using for the last decade or so—have been streaming in from all over the internet, and have thus far been overwhelmingly positive. PR machine at work, or is it worth the hype?

Food Debates Rage this Week

Food battles are coming to a head this season. Last night I attended the panel talk “Can ‘Big Food’ Embrace Sustainable Agriculture”, featuring senior representation from Monsanto, General Mills, Dean Foods, Deutsche Bank, the Rainforest Alliance, and Slow Food. This was one of only several great debates held just this week on the food system, including clashes on ethical farms vs. vegetarianism, and on food stamps vs. nutrition standards for the poor.

American Food Safety Actually on the Move?

(Judson Berkey, Zurich, Switzerland) While concepts such as sustainability and local production have a long tradition in Europe, they are relatively new in the U.S. and still trying to find a footing there. What is not new, however, is the concept of food safety. This is a topic with a long and storied history in America. 2009-2010 is proving to be another leap forward; one that may incorporate new sustainable agriculture paradigms.

NYTimes Biotech and Food Crisis Debate – Unanswered Questions

The New York Times is currently hosting an excellent debate entitled Can Biotech Food Cure Hunger? Contributors include Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, Per Pinstrup-Andersen of Cornell, and Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya. Yet there are serious meta-questions about how we even approach this controversy that remain unanswered.

Crunching the Numbers on a Vegan in a Hummer

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“Smart Choices” Moral Hazard

I wrote back in October 2008, almost exactly one year ago, about the development of the Smart Choices program by the food industry. Now, the tsunami of controversy has finally arrived as “smart choices” products appear on the shelves – led by vanguards such as Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, Cocoa Crispies, and more of your favorites. Even to those like me that support industry-led change, actions speak louder than words when it comes to exposing a failure of the private sector, the easy co-opting of nutritionists, and the need for government regulation and consumer education.

Five Things to Know About DiFara

As Jeffrey Steingarten quite accurately points out, in New York, “long lines form because they were long yesterday.” Occasionally, herding up with a gaggle of tourists for an hour is worth it. Shake Shack on a fair-weathered day comes to mind. Other times, it’s decidedly not (who in the hell waits an hour for a f-ing cupcake?).

If you have any questions about Di Fara, the legendery Booklyn Avenue J New York-style pizza joint run by Dom DeMarco, who’s been making pizzas by hand for the past 42 years, Adam Kuban, has it all covered in glorious detail over at Slice, but I will try to sum up the experience in five quick points.

The Price of Eggs

This has been circulating around the web for a few days, so I won’t add much in terms of my own thoughts on it – the video says quite enough.

Suffice it to say – anyone who is the least bit compassionate about animals should not be buying conventional eggs, whether raw, or prepared in conventional foods like mayonnaise or ice cream.

The video, after the jump…

Boycott Whole Foods?

In case you’ve had your head in the sand, there is an international boycott being staged against Whole Foods Markets. It started on August 11th, when founder and CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal criticizing what he calls “ObamaCare.” It opened with Margaret Thatcher’s wry quote: “The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people’s money,” before moving on to put forward eight libertarian “alternative proposals” to the Health Care bill that echo the right-wing backlash to health care reform.

In addition to the outpouring of snarky editorialists criticizing so-called “arugula activism,” the anti-Whole Foods movement spawned an outcry that began on the internet that began on social networks like Twitter (www.twitter.com), Facebook (The “Boycott Whole Foods” Facebook group is over 32,000 members strong), and even Whole Foods own discussion board!