Corduroy Orange

Jesse,
I don’t understand the difference between all the different types of
eggs…free range, cage free, happy chicken, organic, Omega 3, etc…..Help!
Ida

Free range doesn’t actually mean much of anything. It’s unfortunate, but hens housed in a warehouse, not kept in cages, and given access to the outside through a door at the end of the warehouse that they never travel through are free range. The only difference between cage free eggs and free range eggs is that the cage free hens don’t have the door at the end of the warehouse, but since none of the hens in the other warehouse really take advantage of the door, it’s not a big deal.

Vegetarian diet eggs are preferable to eggs from hens fed chicken meal and fish meal and beef byproducts, though a naturally-raised hen is omnivorous and can get a decent percentage of her diet from bugs and grubs in the ground. So, if you get your eggs from a farm where the hens really are cage free and free range, don’t expect that they will have led a vegetarian life (but do expect that they haven’t been fed industrial byproducts).

Organic eggs may also be raised in a warehouse. The feed may contain some industrial byproducts including fish meal, so long as it is certified organic feed.

With so many shady labeling schemes by large egg distributors, that’s why I recommend that, if possible, you get eggs that are identified by the farm where the chickens were raised. Even better would be to know about the farm and the conditions that the hens are raised in, but at the very least if you are getting farm-fresh eggs from a store, you have indication that a) the eggs are being raised in a fairly small operation and b) the product is good enough for the store to stock it. Not only that, but you have the farm’s contact information so that you can, if you desire, call them up and ask them about where their birds are kept.

In Pittsburgh, eggs from several individual farms are available on a regular basis at the East End Food Co-Op, though the selection of farms they stock tends to vary. Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, Whole Foods, and other locations have eggs from Champion Chicks in Donegal, PA, where the eggs come from a flock of 500 and are gathered by hand. Also, if you ever go on drives outside of Pittsburgh into the rural areas of PA, WV, and OH, it is fairly common to see signs advertising eggs at individual farms. If you happen to pass by such a location and you have the time to stop, I highly recommend that you do.

The Omega-3 eggs are shown to have higher concentrations of Omega-3 fatty acids than a standard egg does. These fatty acids have been shown to perhaps reduce the risk of some types of heart disease. If you are seeking to reduce your risk of heart disease, though, it seems to me that eggs should be at the periphery of a wider range of dietary choices.

I was driving on Monday afternoon and had the radio tuned to NPR, where I heard a snippet of an interview Terry Gross was doing with Dan Koeppel, author of a new book called Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. I was entranced and I stopped the car at Barnes & Noble so I could buy the book—the sort of quick purchase that I almost never make, but in this instance was glad that I did.

I suppose that when it comes to bananas, I’ve always been the typical consumer described on the book’s dust cover, who takes for granted that bananas will always be on the grocery store shelf and never thinks about them much beyond that. Certainly, I’d never dreamed that I’d become so entranced with a book on them that I would tear through it in two days; in fact I had never considered that there would be enough information about bananas to even fill a book.

Of course, if I had thought, I would have realized that there was something strange about the fact that there seems to be only one kind of banana, whereas with every other fruit and vegetable, I’ve fascinated myself by finding and trying as many cultivars as possible. The thing is, there really are thousands of kinds of bananas out there, and we only see one main one on our shelves. It is known in the banana world as the cavendish. The plantain, according to the book, is genetically identical to the cavendish though larger and starchier—a point I am not certain I grasp and I’ll likely be trying to track Mr. Koeppel down to ask him if he can explain it to me a bit more clearly (if it’s genetically identical, why is it different). The red banana that is sometimes on the grocery shelf and that I have never sampled is a different variety—one of the few non-cavendish bananas that makes its way to the USA.

The rest of them have been rejected for widespread sale for one reason or another: either the taste is foreign to USA consumers, it has too thin of a skin to travel well, or both. All that is likely to change over the coming decades, as the cavendish banana is falling victim to Panama Disease, a fungal infection. It’s the same fungal infection that destroyed the plants that bore the bananas my parents ate as children: through the fifties, the cavendish was rejected by fruit companies for its flavor deficiencies and thin skin, but as the gros michel perished, the cavendish stepped in to fill its shoes.

And as for the fruit companies, I’d heard rumors about their misdeeds (Tulane University, where I completed by undergrad, was a beneficiary of Sam Zemurray, onetime president of United Fruit), but I hadn’t realized the extent to which they had used violence to protect their business model, nor the extent to which they have (and continue to) expose workers on banana plantation to toxic chemicals to protect the banana plants from a variety of diseases that they are susceptible to.

Also news to me were the many African nations where bananas are a subsistence crop, and the main source of nutrition. Some of the highland bananas in Uganda come in hues of orange and purple, again, according to Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.

There’s so much about the history and development of bananas and the search for disease-resistant bananas and the technologies developed by the banana companies that I obviously don’t want to spoil for you because Mr. Koeppel did a great deal of research to write it in his book. So, if you enjoy the taste of bananas, whether out of the peel (a snack that was considered scandalous in Victorian times), sliced over cereal, split with ice cream and whipped cream, in a sandwich with peanut butter, in a cream pie, otherwise, or all of the above, you owe it to yourself to get this book and read the fascinating history behind this seemingly simple snack.

In case anyone missed it, Jeremy posted a link to a great NY Times article about eating insects in his comment about “Rodents as Food.”

If anyone in Pittsburgh wants to try a cricket, stop in at Reyna Foods, 21st and Penn in the Strip, where crickets come in a variety of flavors.  I tried a sour cream and onion flavored cricket last weekend.  Truth be told, it was so dusted with the sour cream and onion flavor that I’m not sure the cricket part provided anything but crunch, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless, though after reading the NY Times article, I wonder about insects as cuisine.  The description of water bug meat having “the consistency of crab” and a price tag of “hundreds of dollars a pound” is intriguing, as is the information about the size of the farms insects are raised in.

Combine the sustainability of insect farming with the ability to raise guinea pigs and other small rodents in your own home, combined with the relative inefficiency of raising larger livestock such as beefs and porks, and I wonder if there’s a new cuisine on the horizon of urban-bred insects and rodents as a way to enjoy meat in an ultra-local, ecologically sustainable manner.

True, there’s a huge gross-out factor that needs to be overcome, but as the realities of climate change kick into play over the next few decades, we’ll be forced to reconsider how we grow and ship our food around the world.  There’s no telling how we’ll respond as a people when necessity forces us to rethink the wisdom of factory farming.

On the other hand, it’s tough to imagine your average “I want my chicken boneless and skinless so I don’t have to think about the fact that it was once alive” eater to tolerate a plate full of locusts, legs and wings still attached.  Still, i think I’d prefer that to a future of meat-flavored textured vegetable protein and cheese-flavored yeast extract.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Any reasonably-minded person should be able to acknowledge that engineering food crops to survive applications of herbicides and pesticides is a bad idea. These genetic “enhancements” as they are labeled by their proponents are designed only to increase reliance on poisonous chemicals in conjunction with the growing of our foodstuff. In addition to causing us all to consume more chemicals in our diets, it also leads to higher concentrations of chemicals in our groundwater (and therefore in our drinking water), leading to increased consequences of chemical prevalence throughout the ecosystem (and still more increased human consumption of chemicals, especially any that are bio-accumulative, such as dioxin), especially among the urban poor, who have limited space in which to grow their own vegetables and limited money with which to make purchasing decisions such as opting for the often more-expensive “organic” alternative.

Not to mention that cross-pollination occurs over large geographic boundaries and therefore the genes of the modified crop escape into seeds produced elsewhere. It’s a story we’ve heard many times relating to corn in the Southwest, and the dangers to indigenous corn species throughout Mexico—but it’s not limited to corn.

Highmowing Organic Seeds, which is a joint litigant in a case currently filed against the USDA regarding the agency’s plan to deregulate Roundup-resistant sugar beets, has a very good description of the wide-ranging impact possible from sugar beets to related species including “chard, and red and yellow beets (or ‘table beets’)” and more information about the suit here.

Rodents are a classification of mammal that, on the surface, don’t sound appetizing as a food source.  But, if you think about it, examples of rodentphagia aren’t all that unusual.  I enjoy a bit of rabbit every now and again.  In New Orleans, I used to hear about people eating nutria, though i never had the chance to try any.  Dormice were popular during Roman times and are still eaten in Slovenia today.  My dad’s college roommate used to get weekly deliveries of squirrel brain sandwiches from his family (okay, so that one is a bit odd).

I’ve been reading an almanac of food trivia lately (Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany), and mention of porcupine (said to taste like suckling pig or fowl) and beaver (said to taste like pork) as food sources got me thinking about how wide-ranging of a habit eating rodents might be.

A brief bit of internet research turned up a very informative article on “Rodents as Food Source” from the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Vertebrate Pest Conference in 1990.  It turns out that rodentphagia is a much more widely spread phenomenon than I had ever imagined.

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Hey, Pittsburghers! Get out to the Harris Theater (Downtown, 9th and Liberty) this week to see King Corn, a very entertaining & educational film about how corn is grown, subsidized, and used. A couple of recent college graduates set out from New England for Iowa, where they rent one acre of farmland for a lesson of economics, environment, and nutrition in action as they raise corn and track the process from farm to… just about everywhere.

Show times: Mon (today, 1/14)–Wed (1/16): 7:30 PM; Thurs (1/17): 5:30 & 7:30

If you’re an avid gardener, you already know that the time to start your seeds indoors is fast approaching (only 3 months away). If you’re not (or, if like me, you really like having your own garden even though you can’t seem to quite make the leap from sticking plants in the ground and hoping for the best to tending them and achieving the best possible results from your efforts), you still might be interested in trying to start your own plants from seed this year. My friend Samantha sent me a link to a great website that has seeds for a variety of heirloom varieties of many types of plants:

I just got a catalog from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds out of Mansfield, Missouri, which you might be interested in. It is really neat with both ‘old time’, and oddly colored varieties of tomatoes(purple, yellow, white, orange, striped… imagine a tomato-based “white sauce”!), melons, carrots, etc. They also sell a number of Thai/Asian collected fruits and veggies that I’ve never really seen. Check out the site: http://rareseeds.com/seeds/ You might find something you like! Enjoy!

So, best of luck as you wile away the cold winter months with thoughts of the plants you can grow next summer.

For several months now, Aurora and I have made all of our cupcakes and muffins with the same cupcake cups, washed and used repeatedly. No, we haven’t figured out a way to re-use the aluminum ones—we’ve been using individual silicone cups. When we celebrated an early Christmas over Thanksgiving with my parents, we received a second option to reuse: a silicone muffin tray.

Both options are rated to 500F, make a dozen standard-sized muffins or cupcakes, and are cleaned using soap and water. The ridges in the muffin cups make them slightly more difficult to clean than the smooth-sided muffin tray, but on the other hand the muffin cups store in a smaller space. Either is a terrific way to work on eliminating “disposable” from your kitchen vocabulary.

The food in progress in the photo above is my pumpkin/cranberry cupcake, shown below iced and decorated with cranberries in homemade cranberry sauce.

Top Photo: Johanna Sharrard

We’re getting to the end of local apple season.  Most orchards still have some available, so stock up now to help get you through the winter.  If you find yourself inundated with apples, a pot of applesauce is a great way to use up many at one blow.  This year has been a good one for me in terms of scouting out varieties of apples.  It started out poorly–I didn’t get to the orchard in July or August and as a result missed both the Lodii (the best applesauce apple I’ve yet found) and Rambo (the second best; early apples tend to make great sauce).  I’ve made up for lost time, though, thanks to my new job as a demonstration chef that has allowed me to travel the Pennsylvania countryside.  I’m documenting the apples I’ve used this year to perhaps inspire you to get out to an orchard and try a variety you’ve never had before, and also to inspire me next year to try an even wider selection.

• Lodii–Two grew on my Lodii tree.  I used them, but only for a tart; not for sauce. 
• Macintosh–par for the course, widely available, but still a good apple
• 20-ounce Pippin–large, green, somewhat tart though also soft in texture.  Not a good eating apple but great for cooking, especially pies
• Cortland–very white flesh, somewhat soft in texture, but makes great pies.  matches well with Pippins
• Northern Spy–I wish I’d gotten a bag of these, too; but the place where I got the cortland and Pippins only took cash and I had to choose two of the three to buy.  I sampled it but have noi recommendations on its use.  I list it mainly because it’s on my priority list for a larger quantity next year.
• Red Delicious–among my least favorite apples.  Mushy and mediovcre, but it comes in my CSA box.  Honestly, I wish the farm had a wider variety of tough to find apples rather than locally grown versions of supermarket favorites like this one and
• Golden Delicious–OK to eat but better for cooking with
• Golden Supreme–Better for eatingthan golden delicious by far.  Similar in appearance, though the Supreme tends to have a bit of a pink blush to it when it gets fully ripe
• Unknown–By far my favorite CSA apple was a pinkish apple.  The farmer doesn’t know its variety because the trees were labeled as Golden Supreme when he received them.  Crisp and sweet, I wish I knew what it was called.   
• Stayman Winesap–purchased from a roadside stand featuring an honor box, this batch was a little bit wormy, but the variety is very tasty and cooks well.  If you do wind up with wormy apples, don’t discard the whole apples.  It’s easy to cut around the worms/ worm damage to use the portion of the apple that is unharmed.  Really, the presence of the worms indicated to me that these were likely the only apples (including organic) that I ate that weren’t dosed with large amounts of pesticide.  And, yes, organic produce is treated with pesticides, just not synthetically created chemicals.  Naturally ocurring doesn’t necessarily mean healthful, though–for instance, one of organic apples’ most common pesticides is copper sulfate, which is rather noxious and definitely poisonous (that’s why it kills insects).

The apple I seek and have sought for years is the Gravenstein, the juice of which is available from whole foods, though I’ve never found the apples themselves.  If you have apple tales of your own or know about where to get Gravenstein Apples, let me know!

Guest Post by James Sharrard

On September 16th, we went to the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival. Its subtitle was “The Festival that Stinks.” Big name for a fun, little fair. It was a two day event - Saturday and Sunday - and the total attendance was approximately 10,000 people. Saturday was rainy and windy. We went on Sunday when it was clear and cool. After a dry August, the trees in the hills were just starting to turn.

Obviously, the theme was garlic. Most of the food sold there (from 16 different vendors) contained garlic, from salad with garlic vinaigrette, garlic puled pork, baked poatoes with roasted garlic spread to garlic ice cream (which was made with raw, not cooked, garlic!).

There were 38 booths worth of artists and woodworkers, 14 booths for community organizations, a handful of booths for local forest products and for renewable energy, and about a dozen for the ‘healing arts.’ There was a small animal area, plus there were 40 booths for farmers and agricultural products. The festival even had its own mascot—Garlic Man!

But all that is just numbers. One of the most interesting things about the festival is an aspect that the organizers documented in their publicity, but it really didn’t register until I was there what they meant, that this really was the festival with no trash. The first thing that got my attention was the recycling/composting stations.

After my first snack, I looked for a trash can for my napkin and plastic spoon. What I found was a counter with holes for different categories of waste. All the silverware, cups, plates, and napkins used there were compostable. Cans and bottles were recyclable. The festival didn’t sell bottled water; the organizers requested that people bring their own bottles and drink the free water available there. Or they could buy a reusable water bottle at a stand. And nobody dropped anything on the ground! I finally read in the program/map they handed out that in 2006, the total trash generated was two trash bags!

Here are two links with even more information: first the festival’s own website, and an article about it from the Worcester Telegram.