Thursday, January 28, 2010

Kimchi Festival IN THE NEWS AGAIN! (boston.com)

In Dishing, her regular blog on boston.com, Boston Globe food reporter Devra First writes about the Greater Boston Kimchi Festival:

Kimchi: the new cupcake? So posit the folks behind the upcoming Greater Boston Kimchi Festival. Kimchi is everywhere these days, though perhaps not quite as ubiquitous as cupcakes, and I say yay. For the fermented spicy cabbage that is a mainstay of the Korean diet is one of my favorite foods…

For her full blog, click here:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/dishing/2010/01/kimchi_the_new_1.html

Greater Boston Kimchi Festival details:

Date and time: March 21, 2010, 3PM-7PM
Location: Theodore Parker Unitarian Universalist Church, Boston
Press inquiries: kimchi-press@lactoferment.com
For more information: kimchi-info@lactoferment.com
Web: http://kimchi.lactoferment.com/

Monday, January 18, 2010

T.W. Food: Totally Local (this Wednesday)

It's winter. Something is falling out of the sky here in Boston. Is it crushed ice? Grab your cocktail glass! Whatever it is, it freezes solid as soon as it hits the ground, or your windshield, or your dog.

How on earth can anyone eat local food in Boston at this time of year?

Well, I have blogged about the winter farmers' markets and some of the food events that are happening around town…

But here's the easiest way to eat local food:

Go to T.W. Food in Cambridge for their Totally Local dinner on Wednesday night (January 20th).

Most restaurants boasting "local food" give you some local vegetables, or some local meat, or maybe some locally-made pasta or something. T.W. Food goes way beyond this. Not only are all of the meat and vegetables local…but so is the wheat that went into the bread. So are all of the sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, and fruit—no sugar to be seen). So are the cooking fats (butter, for the most part; there are no olive trees in New England).

In other words: Totally Local.

So if you are curious to see what a brilliant chef can do with local ingredients in the dead of winter, now's your chance to find out.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal that T.W. Food is my favorite restaurant in Boston, and that the food there is awesome.)

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Greater Boston Kimchi Festival IN THE NEWS

The West Roxbury - Roslindale Bulletin has published an article about the Greater Boston Kimchi Festival and Workshop. Click on the images below to see the article. Event info follows.







January 24, 2010, 1PM-3PM: Kimchi Workshop
March 21, 2010, 3PM-7PM: Greater Boston Kimchi Festival
Location: Theodore Parker Unitarian Universalist Church, Boston.
Press inquiries: kimchi-press@lactoferment.com

Registration for workshop & other inquiries: kimchi-info@lactoferment.com
Web: http://kimchi.lactoferment.com/

 

Lionette's Market Sold; Jamey's "Last Diatribe"

Lionette's Market—the Boston retailer offering the greatest variety of local, grass-fed meats, plus excellent assortments of local cheeses and produce—has been sold. The new owners, the Otto family, plan to continue to carry the same sorts of products.

Jamey Lionette announced the sale via email. Along with the announcement, he included a "diatribe" (his word). If you like the flavor of his writing, you can read more in Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, which also includes excellent essays by Prince Charles, Carlo Petrini (the founder of Slow Food), Vandana Shiva (an outspoken food activist), and others. Here's the last bit of Jamey's diatribe:
We must pay the real prices for real food.  Cheap food, like our decadent-climate-burning-lifestyles will be gone in our lifetime.  How?  Either because our planet is no longer suitable for humans to live on it, because of civil unrest, or because we decide to live a sustainable lifestyle instead of a decadent one.  We know the first option will happen, and soon.  As much as we want to deny or ignore it, we are in the 11th hour in our planet’s future with climate change and pollution.  As for the second option, we saw a small glimpse of that almost two years ago when there was civil unrest and food riots in 3 dozen countries around the world.  As for the latter, let’s hope we can get it together.  It seems to be the best option.  But for sure, no one will every live a more decadent lifestyle and eat as much crap food as our present society is.  The question is how will it be stopped?  — Jamey Lionette

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Boycott Forbes Magazine

Fact is stranger than fiction. I couldn't have made this up. Forbes Magazine just named Monsanto "Company of the Year" for 2009:

http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/2010/company_of_the_year.asp

The award came in the same issue as this extraordinarily shallow article, which reads like a press release:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0118/americas-best-company-10-gmos-dupont-planet-versus-monsanto.html

(Is that journalism?)

In my opinion, Monsanto poses the greatest risk to our food supply of any corporate or governmental entity on the planet. Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva, is an excellent collection of essays that explores some of the issues quite eloquently, and from a few different perspectives. Or, for those who prefer a video format, I offer The World According to Monsanto:



If you don't have time for the book or the video, you can search the Internet for monsanto is evil and see what you get.

I'm already boycotting Monsanto to the best of my ability, so it's time to boycott Forbes.



Or perhaps it's long past time to boycott Forbes. Here's the opening paragraph of this article written by Forbes editor Michael Noer in their 8/22/2006 issue:
Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.
It doesn't even matter to me what the rest of the article says, or what the context is. Opening like this is utterly beyond the pale, even though it was no doubt intended to be "controversial" or "provocative". For the magazine to have published it says quite a bit about their attitude. And for them not to have acknowledged their mistake, but instead to have dignified it with a "counterpoint" written by a woman, says even more.

Please cancel my subscription to your magazine. And I will no longer be advertising with you. Thank you very much.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Boston Food In Winter, ADDENDA

Someone let me know about a Natick Winter Market, Saturdays 9:30-1. So please add that to your list!

Just to make things simpler, here's a link to all of the winter markets near Boston. (Or most of them.)

I also forgot to point out another upcoming event, for New Hampshirers and other folks able to drive and spend money on a conference (student discount applies):

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Boston Food In Winter (UPDATED 1/11)

Winter does not have to be a time of deprivation in northern climes.

Here are some winter farmers' markets:
And here are just a very few upcoming food-related events in and around Boston:
  • 1-11: Somerville Farm Share Fair + screening of The Power of Community
    Want to find a CSA for next year? Now is the time to start thinking about it. Many of them sell out by March. While you're at it, see an awesome movie about how Cuba fed itself after its industrial ag system failed, as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. Hint: They did not use GMOs. It's an inspiring story, and it brings with it an important lesson for post-oil ag.

  • 1-24: Hands-On Kimchi Workshop
    Learn to make kimchi! I'm leading a hands-on workshop at the Theodore Parker UU Church in West Roxbury.
  • 1-29, 1-30, 1-31 Fourfold Path to Healing Conference
    Sally Fallon, Tom Cowan, Jaimen McMillan, and others bring us a weekend conference built around their research and the research of Weston A. Price and Rudolf Steiner. I went last year, and it was inspiring. Check my blog from last year. In Nashua, NH.

  • 1-31: Souper Bowl II
    Who wants to watch football when you can have delicious, homemade soup? At Haley House.

  • 2-09: Preserving and Pickling Class I
    2-16: Preserving and Pickling Class II

    A two-part, hands-on, in-depth class going deep into food preserving, with an emphasis on fermentation. Also covers how to prepare dishes using your preserved foods. Click the link for more details. At the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.

  • 3-21: Greater Boston Kimchi Festival
    So you think your kimchi is pretty good, huh? Enter it in a competition, and find out! Or maybe you just want to come check out some kimchi. A kimchi festival complete with celebrity judges, live musical entertainment, and kimchi-making demos. At the Theodore Parker Church.

Here are a few Boston food-related sites to keep an eye on for more events:

      Friday, January 1, 2010

      Some Ammonia With Your Beef?

      For reason number 173 to eat Meat Of Known Origin, take a look at this article from yesterday's New York Times.

      Summary:

      Contamination, particularly with E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella, has been a persistent problem with mainstream ground beef. Eight years ago, someone started a company called Beef Products, Inc., based on the idea of treating questionable bits of meat with ammonia to kill the pathogens. Changing and inconsistently-observed treatment standards within the company, combined with ineffective oversight by federal agencies, has resulted in meat reaching the public whose safety and palatability is questionable, either because it is tainted with pathogens or because it smells like ammonia. State prison officials in Georgia rejected some of the meat, deeming it unfit for consumption by their inmates, even while the same meat was being served in national fast food chains, whose standards are apparently lower. Click here for the whole article.

      Thoughts For A New Year: Meat Of Known Origin, Revisited

      One of my New Year's resolutions last year was to eat only Meat Of Known Origin.

      I stuck to this resolution pretty well. But I did make some exceptions—for example, when I found myself at someone's house for dinner, I ate what was put in front of me, rather than explaining why I wouldn't eat it.

      Why did I make this exception? Was it out of consideration for my hosts? If I had made my explanation to my hosts, for them to go on eating their Meat Of Unknown Origin would have been like admitting that they didn't care about suffering as much as I did, or didn't care about food as much as I did, or weren't as clever or resourceful as I was, or even that they couldn't afford to pay for MOKO.

      Perhaps I made the other-peoples-houses exception not for their sake but for my own, so that I could avoid a conversation that might be uncomfortable for me. (I don't enjoy delicate conversations, although I am better at them than I used to be.)

      It's pretty easy for me to eat Meat Of Known Origin while at home, surrounded by my familiar food supply chain and restaurants; eating MOKO on the road is generally much more difficult. So I made another exception when I traveled internationally, because language and cultural barriers made it harder for me to know where my meat was coming from, and because factory farming is somewhat less prevalent outside the US. Then I started making exceptions when I traveled within the US, for reasons of convenience as much as anything else.

      Then I thought I was getting a cold, and I decided that what I needed was some of the delicious Vietnamese beef-noodle soup called phở. So I went to a Vietnamese restaurant and had some. (More about phở here.)

      One of my resolutions for 2010: I will do better.

      I just finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer. I recommend this book highly to anyone who eats meat, and to anyone who does not. In it, you will find such apparent contradictions as the vegetarian rancher, and the vegan who builds slaughterhouses. Foer explores the ethics and alliances of the world of meat in a nuanced way. Rather than simply presenting the facts, like a journalist, he provides useful moral and cultural frameworks, and invites us to explore for ourselves how everything fits together. He goes beyond previous writers on the subject of "sustainable" meat. Reading his book helped remind me that I could do better than I have done before—and that in fact I must. And perhaps even that I could eat less meat than I have before.

      I would invite everyone to think about where their food is coming from, particularly their meat. If you do eat meat, have you explored sources outside the factory system?