Posts tagged food
media girl
Capturing bits & pieces on media, politics, culture & daily life
Mealsharing: Finding a Home Cooked Meal Around the World
You may have heard about couch-surfing your way around the world. It’s a way to meet people in their homes. Now there’s an online service that helps you get a home cooked meal when you’re traveling.
Food service workers at American University (AU) in Washington, D.C. ratified a groundbreaking contract Monday, with “sustainability language” that includes training and increased hours so they can cook from scratch with fresh, local ingredients—and a watchdog committee to hold their employer to it.
Workers will receive 16 hours of paid training per year on sustainable food prep and cooking practices, a key demand they had made as part of their “Real Food, Real Jobs” campaign.
(Source: ziatroyano, via other-stuff)
It’s time to pair wine like the sommelier! Follow the guidelines to make the best food and wine pairings at every meal. Eight main styles of wine matched with their ideal food groups.
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton believes in the power of food. Over more than three years as America’s top diplomat, she has increasingly used cuisine as a tool to bring people together.
Now Clinton is enlisting top-rated chefs from across the nation to join an effort to forge cultural exchanges over the dining table worldwide.
On Friday, more than 80 chefs are being inducted into the first American Chef Corps. These food experts could help the State Department prepare meals for visiting dignitaries, travel to U.S. embassies abroad for educational programs with foreign audiences or host culinary experts from around the world in their U.S. kitchens.
The new Diplomatic Culinary Partnership is part of Clinton’s “smart power” philosophy of using “every diplomatic tool at our disposal,” said U.S. Chief of Protocol Capricia Penavic Marshall, in a written response to questions from The Associated Press.”
Dammit. How did I miss this? I’m on every climate list and journalist group known to humankind. Note, even Hawaii is on this map. More soon.
U.S. Declares the Largest Natural Disaster Area Ever Due to Drought
The blistering summer and ongoing drought conditions have the prompted the U.S. Agriculture Department to declare a federal disaster area in more than 1,000 counties covering 26 states. That’s almost one-third of all the counties in the United States, making it the largest distaster declaration ever made by the USDA.
The declaration covers almost every state in the southern halfof the continental U.S., from South Carolina in the East to California in the West. It’s also includes Colorado and Wyoming (which have been hit by devatasting wildfires) and Illinois, Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska in the Midwest. However, it does not include Iowa, which is the largest grain and corn producer in the U.S.
The USDA’s latest crop report is projecting a 12 percent decrease in the corn harvest this year, which would still be the third-largest haul on record. Despite the negative outlook, grain prices remains quite low, according to CNBC.
The ruling allows farmers in those affected counties to apply for low-interest loans and face reduced penalties for grazing on protected lands. The USDA says the loans will only amount to around $4 million, but is one of the few “limited tools” the department has available to help farmers. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has asked for a complete re-authorization of all existing agriculture programs, including crop insurance, that can be used to support struggling farms.
About 53 percent of the country is facing “moderate to extreme drought” so far this summer.
(via nickturse)
To feed another 2 billion people, the world will need to produce 70 percent more food, and up to 100 percent more in developing countries.
centerforinvestigativereporting:
Just one of the food-and-water facts from the campaign organizers at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter - NYTimes.com
Many real-world cooks have wondered at the output of authors like Martha Stewart, Paula Deen and Jamie Oliver, who maintain cookbook production schedules that boggle the mind. Rachael Ray alone has published thousands of recipes in her cookbooks and magazine since 2005. How, you might ask, do they do it?
The answer: they don’t. The days when a celebrated chef might wait until the end of a distinguished career and spend years polishing the prose of the single volume that would represent his life’s work are gone. Recipes are product, and today’s successful cookbook authors are demons at providing it — usually, with the assistance of an army of writer-cooks.
“The team behind the face is invaluable,” said Wes Martin, a chef who has developed recipes for Ms. Ray and others. “How many times can one person invent a new quick pasta dish?”
40 dishes every Washingtonian must try
The photos are fun to look at.
Dutch Astronaut Brings Cheese To Space
Dutch astronaut André Kuipers got official permission to take a whole bunch of gouda with him when he heads up to the International Space Station for six months. Kuipers gets to take nine containers of bonus food and every single one of those babies is going to be packed full of gouda.
centerforinvestigativereporting:
As Egyptians move into the second phase of elections this week, Sandy Tolan explores the debate over food policy in the wake of what some are calling the “revolution of the hungry.”
The Food for 9 Billion series is a collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Homelands Productions, PBS Newshour and American Public Media’s Marketplace.
Thanksgiving food, by the numbers:
3,000 — The estimated amount of calories in a typical Thanksgiving meal, including turkey, side dishes, and dessert
590 — The amount of calories in an average serving of a traditionally prepared Thanksgiving turkey
5,000 to 6,000 — The estimated amount of calories people consume throughout Thanksgiving Day — roughly triple the recommended daily intake
3,500 — The amount of calories needed for the body to create one extra pound of fat
If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel— as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them— wherever you go.
(Source: emotional-algebra, via calleverytruthfalse)
It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other.
(via curiositycounts)
La Cosecha - The Story of the Children Who Feed America
The film follows these children as they follow the crops they harvest, their lives governed by climate, demand, trade, and the greater economy. The verite footage of the children and their year of toil is augmented by the children having the chance to speak for themselves about their lives. Read more here.
Read a review of La Cosecha here. A big saludo to Eva Longoria for backing this documentary film as an Executive Producer. For more information, visit Shine Global.
$64 a week.
And these are the people who are lazy good-for-nothings who don’t do anything and don’t deserve anything?
I’ll remember that, Mr. I-sit-in-my-air-conditioned-office-40-hours-a-week-and-surf-the-internet-and-shouldn’t-have-to-pay-taxes-because-I’m-a-REAL-AMURRIKAN.
(Source: thinkmexican, via politicalpartygirl)
Nathan Myhrvold, author of Modernist Cuisine, a six-volume, 2,400-page set of books about the science of cooking, was on The Kojo Nnamdi Show to talk about what he calls the “aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy,” which include physics, chemistry, microbiology, nutrition, mechanical engineering and most importantly, good food. http://wamu.fm/r8Xj6P
