fatbastardeats.com

A lot happening this week. Food prices, genetic engineering, and snails :/ So lets dive right into the weekly links:

• As I mentioned earlier, the rise in food prices is complex and being used by certain individuals to advance their particular agenda. They have a great Rising Food Price resource over at What To Eat.
• On the flip side the NYTs has an article listing the advantages of the rise in food prices. It’s good to see someone acknowledging the truth of economics, nothing is bad or good as much as it is different. Unless it costs me more then it’s bad.
• Delicious Days contemplates what is the appropriate number of snails in your lettuce. I vote 0.
• Serious Eats has a nice little article on The Queen of Porchetta. I included it just for this pic.
• Heinz is engineering a sweeter tomato to save money on sugar and high fructose corn syrup. And The Onion has a brilliant counter point.
• For those of you who have never been so fortunate, duck fat is the true food of the gods. If you ever thought about how to bring a vegetarian over to the side of light, you considered how to use it. Serious Eats has a neat little article on where you can find french fries made with duck fat. God Bless them.
• Not Eating Out in NY(is it just me, or does that sound dirty?) has a great primer on mixed drinks at home. I’m a big supporter of teaching the lost art of the cocktail to a new generation of appletini drinking limpwrists who wouldn’t know Gin if it bit them on the ass.
• This half banana holder is supposed to save your banana from turning brown. You know what else works? Some saran wrap and a rubber band. Why do people buy this crap?
• This is a great recipe for ranch dressing, something I’ve been thinking about making for myself for a long time. I don’t know about using the cream whipper dispenser to make it frothy, but still.
• Here’s a tip on how to reuse onions to get..more onions. Weird. From the Tip Nut.
• And finally from an unlikely source, Lifehacker, comes a little video on how to cut a mango. If you’ve never done it before this will save you hours.

photo credit: dier madrid

So that’s this week in food. Lots of good stuff out there, if you see anything I should be putting up drop me a line.

The New York Times recently threw up this article on wasting food in America(thanks BoingBoing) and I can’t remember when I last read such unrepentant hippy bullshit.

Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries through the world.

Oh please. The riots are tragic but the rising food prices go far beyond America. And I’m tired of newspapers and bloggers jumping on whatever offers a cheap and easy solution and saying “See, there’s the problem.”

The problem isn’t that we throw out huge amounts of food, our food is the best preserved on the planet. It would be better to throw out less and I support the Second Harvest group in their efforts to serve food that wouldn’t otherwise be used. But no matter how little we use the China and India want more and better food. And one of the biggest causes of the increase of food prices is the increase in gas prices. The machinery to plant it, harvest it and most importantly transport it all run on gas and not good feelings. Making french toast with day old bread does nothing to stop that(but it’s a good idea anyways, that makes the best toast).

photo credit: leadenhall

I have always said that ethanol is a scam, but getting rid of it won’t make rice cheaper. You want cheaper rice? Plant more of it. You want cheaper corn? Plant more of it. You want cheaper beef. Plant more…fuck it you’re just gonna have to pay for beef.

My point is blaming Americans for doing what everyone in an industrialized society does, throwing out bad food, is stupid and pointless and won’t feed a single fucking person. The fact is we produce a certain amount of food on a certain amount of land, that hasn’t changed in years but the population of the world has. We can make more food, we can get rid of some people, or you can invest in my Soylent Green company and we can do both at the same time. But other than that shit’s just going to get more expensive and people and the bottom are going to get squeezed.

So start a vegetable garden or shut the fuck up.