Regal as ever, she turns 20 and celebrates with an early-evening $20 menu. Queen City Grill, at the corner of First and Blanchard, has seen her once-seedy neighborhood transformed. Her glowing mahogany bar has become a club for Belltowners who avoid Belltown’s clubs.
Part-owner and general manager Robert Eickhof firmly at the helm. Sit on the deck overlooking First and order the crabcakes. “Sidewalk Dining” at its best.
Just as politicians hate voters, Corporate America hates its customers. Valid interests become trivialized, legitimate concerns minimized. Anheuser Busch, which has been selling an “organic” beer for the past year, would benefit from new Ag dept rules to allow a host of non-organic additives.
Here’s the pitch Anheuser Busch is making on its website for Wild Hop Lager:
In today’s world of artificial flavors, preservatives and factory farming, knowing what goes into what you eat and drink can just about drive you crazy. That’s why we have decided to go back to basics and do things the way they were meant to be … naturally.”
“Wild Hop Lager is made with 100% Organic Barley Malt, certified by the USDA for a rich, flavorful taste.”
Except that it’s not. The statement is a flat-out, baldfaced lie. The hops, essential to flavor, are not organic at all. In fact, USDA rules have been bent to allow beer companies to use fertilizers and pesticides on hops. Oh, and that “Green Valley Brewing Company,” my foot. It’s Budweiser, friends.
If you pay attention, you know that “organic” hasn’t meant squat ever since the USDA got its hands on the term.
More than three dozen non-organic ingredients will be allowed under new rules taking effect Friday. Sure, there’s a voice of outrage in the wilderness (Finland, Minnesota); the Organic Consumers Association is crying foul. But what’s a few thousand ragged hippies compared to the financial and political muscle of Industrial Farm & Pharma?
What deep contempt those marketers must have for their customers! We’ve become a nation of zombies; we’ll literally swallow anything.
Comes as no surprise to discover that a website called TheGiantHamburger sells a do-it-yourself “16-inch giant hamburger kit” for $19.95 plus postage. All you need is 10 pounds of ground beef and one or two friends.
Mention this in passing because Burger King, which has been running a distant third in the burger wars ($1 million per store, compared with $1.9 million for Mickey D), is beefing up its sales with a new 1,000-calorie Quad Stacker. It complements last year’s entry in the megaburger sweepstakes, the 1,230-calorie Triple Stacker With Cheese, also from BK. The winner, calorie-wise, is the Double $6 from Carl’s Jr., weighing in at 1,530 calories and 111 grams of fat.
The winner, sales wise, is actually In-n-Out, at $2 million per store, but they’re a small, region chain by comparison. BK, on the other hand, has three stores north of downtown, two south, and three on the east side. Mickey has 25 locations within 10 miles of the Needle. In case you’re still hungry.
But there’s hope! Remember the 5-second rule: If you drop something on the floor, no cooties if you pick in 5 seconds. A recent study warned that bacteria actually swarm cookie crumbs on contactm but it turns out, the experiment was rigged; researchers had salted the floor with deadly e.coli bacteria. The very latest study, reported today in Newsday, refutes that with a real-life experiment conducted at a high school cafeteria. No harmful germs arrived for a full minute.
So go ahead, order that Quad Stacker, that Triple With Cheese, that deep-fried BaconMegaCheeseBurger, and don’t worry if you happen to drop it on the floor. The staph and strep bugs won’t touch it. They know what’s going to kill them.
Quick, while Paris is in jail and the politicians annointed as “official” candidates by CNN and Fox are poking each others’ eyes out, let’s take a moment to talk about the Farm Bill. (Yeah, right.) Seriously, because you are what you eat, you know. (Yeah, right.)
We’ve written about this before; the Farm Bill is one of the country’s most important pieces of social engineering because it provides subsidies to crops (corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton), thus determining what gets grown where.
Agricultural policy is a classic MEGO topic, and that’s what the corn lobby is counting on. But a guy named Earl Blumenauer is sending up some flares. He’s a “Democrat” congressman from Oregon’s 3rd District (encompassing Portland), and, more to the point, a savvy blogger. Although he represents a decidedly urban constituency, he wants to see a farm policy that makes sense, that supports family farmers, that ensures a healthy food supply.
Blumenauer’s a guest columnist this week on TPMCafe.com, an online forum that grew out of the liberal Talking Points Memo. And he’s got his own blog, where he’s laying out a Food & Farmer Bill of Rights.
What harm has our government’s official policy wrought? For a start, Blumenauer writes, “Fruits, vegetables, and row crops are largely bypassed in favor of lavish subsidies for a few commodities.” Just one example: the well-intentioned but archaic policy to prop up the price of sugar during the Depression has backfired; today, it’s doing nothing to help the domestic sugar industry while making it impossible for Third World cane farmers to survive.
While we’re at it, think how silly it is for sugar grown in Hawaii to be refined in California, shipped to New York for packaging and shipped back to Hawaii in one-gram paper packets. Not just silly but wasteful.
Folklife, Sasquatch, Bite, Bumberpalooza, the fests and feasts just keep coming. Elephant ears, brats, shishkaberries, deep fried desserts. Don’t know whether to laugh, cry or reach for the Maalox.
Larceny pays, if you’re the ceo. Should you get caught with your hand in the company till (or fingering your back-dated stock options), you might have to submit to the indignity of a perp walk but the stockholders pay your legal fees and the odds are you won’t do a day in the pokey. (Get busted for stealing a loaf of bread, on the other hand, and it’s hard time for sure.) But what penalty awaits those who abuse public trust?
In this country, there’s always a convenient underling to take the fall for huge public scandals. It’s part of the job description, as in “Goat, comma, scape.”
So what a welcome surprise to see two developments from across the Pacific. In Japan, the agriculture minister committed suicide rather than face questioning in a corruption scandal. And in China, the official in charge of drug safety has actually been sentenced to death.
Can you imagine anything like that here? “Heck of a job, Brownie” would take on a whole new dimension.
Montreal and Seattle versions of poutine
When will they learn, those pretentious New Yawk snots? With the solemnity befitting the announcement of a cure for cancer, the NYTimes reports that three Gotham spots now serve Montreal’s beloved junk food, poutine. Whazzat? Duh: french fries with cheese curds and gravy, dumbo.
In Australia, where Canadian eating habits aren’t automatically ridiculed, they’ve eaten poutine for decades. Aluminum to-go containers are filled to the brim with hot, glorious gravy so the fries stay warm. Aussie-born Teressa Davis insisted on having poutine on the menu at Steelhead Diner, especially since her Market neighbor, Beecher’s Cheese, provides fresh curds daily. “We’re so avant garde that I can’t even stand it,” she says.
The feds are trying to get the Chinese to pay more attention to food safety.
Why is this even necessary? Because, as the Washington Post reported over the weekend:
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
Oh, and don’t think you can brush your teeth and hope for the best; contaminated toothpaste was on the list.
Coordinating Homeland Insecurity, Ag Department and FDA efforts–the job of our new Food Safety Czar–isn’t made any easier by systematic, institutional denial that there’s even a problem (an upbeat article on Chinese “progress” in Ag’s Amber Waves magazine), insufficient funding for inspections and general indifference at the highest levels of government. Economist Paul Krugman, in the New York Times, blames the Bush administration’s laissez-faire approach: willful and deliberate neglect.
Seriously: safe food shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of free-market ideology. By all means, go after Chinese poisoners, but don’t forget about the distributors of dirty California spinach.
Mother Noella and her Bethlehem cheese
Mother Noella Marcellino, who visited Seattle this weekend for the Cheese Festival, knows the secret of life; she’s seen it through a microscope. The Cheese Nun, as she’s known, started milking cows 30 years ago at a cloistered Benedictine order in Connecticut. A Fulbright Fellowship took her to France to see, touch, smell and taste cheesemaking techniques. Today, having earned a PhD in microbiology, she’s considered one of the foremost authorities on the precise details of lactic fermentation.
Cheesemaking evolved as a means of transforming milk proteins (the essential nourishment of all mammalian species) into something more permanent and portable. It’s not terribly convenient, after all, to travel with a herd of goats. What we call the ripening of cheese is in fact its destruction by mold.
The question, once you get past the basics, is why France (for example) has so many distinctly different cheeses. The answer is in the diversity of molds; Mother Noella is particularly drawn to a particular strain: geotrichum candidum, which produces the unique ripening and flavor characteristics of one cheese from the volcanic Auvergne region in central France, St. Nectaire.
Much is written about terroir, the sense of place conveyed by cheese and wine. Mother Noella’s invaluable contribution to the discussion: terroir is not just what the animals eat, it’s also the naturally occurring bacteria in the cheese caves. The cheese is alive, and Mother Noella, like the poet William Blake, marvels:
To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.
Down on phony farms, up for the real thing.
Disturbing news in the New York Times: a middle-class family raising chickens in Manhattan.
Disturbing news in the Wall Street Journal: developing suburban housing tracts as pseudo-farms.
Whatever happened to real farms? Couple of good examples.
First, one of Washington’s foremost producers of goat cheese, Quillisascut Farms is offering farm-stays to beginning chefs. What a great way for to start out: seeing the food grow, getting close to the animals.
Owners Rick and Lorna Lea Mysterly explain it all on their website.
And our friends at Growing Goodness have just released the DVD of Farmboy, a documentary about American farms based on the book by John Babcock.
Meantime, Cornichon’s been nominated (not by me, not by anyone I know) for “Best Food Blog” in the Blogger’s Choice Awards. Click on the image below & vote!
Cornichon! 