Archive for the 'Cooking' Category

Monday Links: April 14th, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on April 14, 2008
in Business, Cooking, Culture, Education, Energy, Environment, Monday Links and Search
. 2 Comments

Happy Monday. I decided to start the week (sharing with coworkers, naturally) with Whole Wheat Apple Muffins, following this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Del.icio.us. (nerd joke!). Enjoy a few links as you consider how good an apple muffin would taste right now (answer: unbelievably good).

  • Could Google benefit from asking users to input their race before searching? The NY Times reports on Rushmore Drive, a new search engine that delivers search results catered to specific racial groups. The company behind Rushmore Drive started with an African-American focus, but plans on expanding to other races; from the article:

[The site] offers search results that, at first glance, border on stereotypes. A search query for “Thanksgiving recipes,” for instance, yields sites featuring recipes for sweet potato pie and collard greens. But according to Johnny Taylor, the chief executive of Rushmore Drive, the results are based on years of search data from IAC’s Ask division.

Rushmore Drive analyzed search results for 3,000 of the most popular search terms in areas with large black populations and found that when people in those areas searched for recipes, they were much more likely to click on pages with soul food. Those searching for hair products, dance, cars, fraternities and sororities also ended up on vastly different Web sites than people who lived in areas with smaller black populations.

  • Here’s a quick Fast Company featurette on the new D.C. Nationals ballpark. It’s the first professional ballpark to receive LEED certification. Can’t wait to catch a game (or 3) there in May
  • This is old news, but in case you missed it (or didn’t understand the details), here’s a Washington Post article describing the new partnership between Google and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The U.N. will use Google Earth to draw attention to the plight of refugees around the globe and to illustrate their forced emigration.
  • [slaps head for not thinking of this]: Here’s a simple idea for storing your ever-growing list of frequent flier/hotel reward program/valued shopper numbers…file them away in your cell phone under a specific heading. Brilliant…the Internet is a beautiful thing.

Happy Monday.

Pork Across the Pond and Here at Home

Published
by
Taylor
on April 10, 2008
in Agriculture, Animals, Business, Cooking, Environment, Health and Sustainability
. 12 Comments

hogsLast night’s winner on Top Chef served grilled shrimp with a pickled chili salad and miso smoked bacon.  The dish looked delicious, and who can blame the judges for going with the clear winner: bacon.  What self-respecting meat eater doesn’t love the salty, crispy stuff?  On a recent episode of Iron Chef America, Cat Cora referred to maple and brown sugar bacon as “pig candy,” which I find both hilarious and a little disgusting.  Regardless, one thing is clear: many of us freaking love bacon.

Here’s the bad news: Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest hog producer (based, regrettably, in my home state of North Carolina) is responsible for true environmental injustice in rural communities in NC and IA…and now they’re expanding to Europe.  Grist reports (emphasis mine):

In the 1990s, Smithfield perfected the meat industry’s infamous “vertical integration” strategy that it’s now unveiling in Eastern Europe. In an old-school meat market, packers bought livestock from independent farmers. But starting in the early ’90s in the United States, dominant meat packers began to raise vast numbers of their own animals, stuffing them into concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs).

In doing so, they put independent farmers in direct competition with [Smithfield's] own livestock operations — a game that the meat packer usually wins. Farms go out of business in droves, unable to sustain themselves on the low prices offered by the packers; survivors scale up, mimicking the packers’ intensive techniques. That is, they CAFOize, using debt to erect large confinement buildings into which they stuff thousands of hogs. Most of them essentially cede their independence, working under contracts wherein the packers supply the feed and the hogs.

The trends now playing out in Poland has already flattened small farmers in Iowa and North Carolina. When Smithfield first bulled its way into Poland in 1999, after buying an old state-run processing plant, it declared its intention to make Poland “the Iowa of Europe.”

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Monday Links: April 7, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on April 7, 2008
in Advertising, Business, Cooking, Design, Energy, Environment, Health, Monday Links, Philanthropy, Sociology and Sustainability
. 3 Comments

Sorry for the delay in posting these links, folks. I’ve been traveling, and I’m just now getting back to bloggin’. Unlike some people, I’m determined to make it through the 826 unread items in my Google Reader. How about a few links?

Although common tracking systems, known as cookies, have counted a consumer’s visits to a network of sites, the new monitoring, known as “deep-packet inspection,” enables a far wider view — every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets — like electronic envelopes — that the system can access and analyze for content

  • This Nick Kristof column on racial and gender bias provides links to a number of interesting online psychological tests.
  • PhilanTopic highlights a Gates Foundation initiative aimed at involving scientists who might not normally focus on global health issues, particularly those in the developing world or in complimentary disciplines. From the Gates site:

The initiative is modeled after the grand challenges formulated more than 100 years ago by mathematician David Hilbert. His list of important unsolved problems has encouraged innovation in mathematics research ever since. Similarly, the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative aims to engage creative minds from across scientific disciplines — including those who have not traditionally taken part in global health research — to work on 14 major challenges.

  • Smitten Kitchen is my new favorite food/cooking blog. This lemon blueberry yogurt cake looks amazing (due in no small part to their expert photography…and baking).
  • If you’re looking to spice up an office memo, or maybe a senior thesis, try the beard font.

That should be enough for now. Sorry to fill the links with so much random stuff, but expect more *ahem* serious blogging to follow this week.

Sunday Cooking…With the Internet

Published
by
Taylor
on March 2, 2008
in Cooking and Random
. 14 Comments

cookin.jpgI’ve been traveling quite a bit lately, both for fun and for work. When I get home from a week or more on the road, one of my first impulses is to cook something delicious with (preferably) lots of fresh vegetables. I know you’re probably thinking “what does this have to do with Tropophilia?” Well, it so happens that this particular culinary adventure was only possible thanks to the internet.

While I love to cook, I don’t actually own a cookbook. I can’t remember a time in my “cooking life” (roughly since I went to college, unless you count several attempts at gingerbread cookies as a young ‘un) when I haven’t been able to quickly search the web for a recipe. Recently, my access to awesome recipes and expertise broadened beyond the web and the Food Network.* I’m talking about video podcasts; specifically, the Cooks Illustrated free weekly (5 minute) podcasts on iTunes.

A recent podcast demonstrated technique for a “quick” beef and vegetable soup. They promised flavor akin to a soup that simmers for hours, all in 60 minutes. These are my kind of cooks–obsessive compulsive about ingredients, flavors, and technique…and looking for shortcuts. I was intrigued by watching the podcast, and soup sounded delicious. The recipe is posted on the Cook’s Illustrated’s podcast site (the normal site is paid-registration only; the podcast recipes are free). One quick grocery store trip later, I was cookin’.

I’m happy to report that the soup turned out very well. Now I’ve laid down the gauntlet for Jarred to try Cook’s Illustrated’s apple galette recipe. I think his sweet tooth will drive him to action.

Pictures of my experiment after the break…

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Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]

Published
by
a Guest
on February 3, 2008
in Agriculture, Cooking, Environment and Sustainability
. 7 Comments

It is my great pleasure to introduce our first guest blogger, good friend Bruce. He has been a loyal reader of Tropophilia from the very beginning, and asked us if he could contribute some of his own thoughts. Enjoy, and thanks Bruce!

Like many who have recently graduated college, I like to think of myself as a master of frugality - raiding the free bagel stash at work, going an extra two days without doing laundry so that I won’t use up as many quarters in the long run, et cetera. One of my ways to save money is to not eat out so often and to buy cheaper varieties of food at the grocery. I still eat well (I do like to cook), but I have always bought non-organic milk, meat, and produce. While I’m at the store, the bottom line has been all that mattered.

But recently I’ve come home from the store and thought of the implications of this economic behavior. I, like most Americans I assume, really have no idea where my food comes from, how it is produced, and who produced it. And when cost is the only consideration, that ignorance is not really a problem. But what about the hidden cost of a lot of that food? As Field Mahoney points out in a Slate column, even organic food, free of pesticides and produced by those romantic small farms, can come from thousands of miles away and will contribute to the burning of a lot of fossil fuels before arriving in the grocery store. In his book, Deep Economy, Bill McKibben states that “growing and distributing a pound of frozen peas required 10 times as much energy as the peas contained.” That’s a lot of excess CO2.

So my first question is this: should we, as conscientious consumers, consider local production of food as not only a choice we should make, but as a workable and feasible alternative to today’s food production system?

Continue reading ‘Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]‘