Rants & Raves


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Industrial Food Complex

Warehouse

Editor’s Note: As you may remember, ES contributor forkitude has given up the corporate life to take the plunge into culinary school.

Part of culinary education is learning how to purchase food. Therefore, I found myself in a food Home Depot during my walking tour of the 245,000-square-foot Sysco warehouse in Lincoln, NE.

When did food distribution become so mechanized and industrial?

Sysco was started in the 1970s by several producers in order to distribute different food stuffs to buyers on the same truck. This idea has evolved into a food machine. And it felt like a machine.

We walked past boxes labeled “fresh cut vegetables.” Maybe the English language needs a new definition for the word fresh. “Still consumable” perhaps?

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Pay What You Want

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Driving through rural Pennsylvania I came across a great roadside family farmstand. In addition to all of the late summer and fall produce, the warm summer weather has made the apple harvest in the state come a little bit earlier. Think crisp apples with intense sugars.

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Especially surprising was the fact that payment at this stand was based on the honor system. There was even a sign saying if an item wasn’t marked, to pay what you wanted. In a world where organic often means more expensive, there is something beautiful about the simplicity.

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Has Top Chef Jumped the Knife?

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Editors’ Note: DC-based blogger Fuchs Foodie just can’t take it anymore. Today, he joins the ES team to point out just what’s been bugging a lot of us about Top Chef this season.

Recent press about Top Chef reads like the notes of a marriage counselor trying to figure out why a once-meaningful relationship has taken a nosedive. In a July poll, the L.A. Times found that 60 percent of people surveyed thought that Top Chef is “losing its heat.” Food writers have offered plenty of opinions to explain the sudden disaffection towards this once exceedingly popular show. The chefs this season aren’t talented enough, says John Horn in the L.A. Times. There aren’t any villains you love to hate, says Josh Ozersky in Time magazine. Yumsugar is tired of the same challenges recycled from previous seasons.

As a long-time watcher of the show, I see some truth to each of these theories, but I can think of a more fundamental problem: Top Chef is a show about food that no longer teaches us much of anything about food. Instead of actually entertaining its foodie audience with inventive dishes, the producers obsess over portraying every personality quirk they can mine from the contestants. In between quirks, the producers share mundane details about the contestants’ lives.

To see if I was imagining things, during last week’s episode, I kept track of the information I learned about cooking in one column, and, in a second column, information about the contestants’ personal issues/dog-walking habits.

Here’s what I learned about food:

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in Rants & Raves / TV 12 comments
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DC Dining Guide: Where To Bring Your Tea Partying Parents

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With this weekend’s Restoring Honor Rally taking place in DC , we expect many locals will have friends and family members visiting from out of town. Most likely from waaaay out of town. So we here at ES thought we’d do our patriotic duty and make their trip (and your lives) a little bit easier. Here is our guide to where to dine in DC with your not-so-liberal visitors…

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in Politics / Rants & Raves / Restaurants 3 comments
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Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

bagel

– 65 percent of you say New York bagels are the real deal. Not that Montreal doesn’t have its defenders. Food Guy Montreal:

OUR bagels are tasteless? Smaller they may be. Crispier, perhaps, but they are NOT crispy in any way shape of form. Dry? Oh no no no no no no. They are most certainly not dry. They deliver the delightful chewyness that NY bagels do not deliver. I find NY bagels dough-ier if that makes sense. They are commonly referred to as “rolls with a hole” which is exactly what they are.

But rumblegut (great handle, btw) will not stand for such blasphemy:

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in Rants & Raves / Veggie 0 comments
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Viva la Leftovers

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When my brother moved out of my parents’ house after college he couldn’t wait to leave the land of Tupperware behind. To our amusement, my brother received Tupperware from every member of the family as a housewarming gift.

My dad keeps all plastic containers. Imagine portions of horseradish hummus in old Philadelphia cream cheese containers, half melons stored in old pre-made cookie dough containers and cucumbers being pickled in old plastic pretzel containers.

As much as I want to break the family habit of collecting vehicles for leftovers, I just can’t.

I’ve started saving glass though. Wide and short salsa jars, long and narrow caper jars, filling them with couscous and mysterious grains.

But then I was sent Cover Mate’s Stretch-to-Fit Food Covers. And while my addiction to Tupperware has not lessened I now have found a new, easier way to never throw out food: whatever bowl or dish or glassware I have baked or served or eaten something in I just cover it with this dishwasher safe swatch of plastic.

Viva la Leftovers.

in Rants & Raves 9 comments
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It’s In, It’s Out, It’s Over

in and out

If you’ve ever known anyone from California, you have undoubtedly heard them go on (and on and on) about the glory of In-N-Out Burger, a fast food joint that, to hear them tell it, must have been founded by Jesus or something.

While I’m not here to hate on In-N-Out, I have to say that in my limited excursions to the golden state I’ve been a little underwhelmed. Yes, the lettuce and tomato are surprisingly fresh, and the beef patty is a huge improvement over McDonald’s — although if you ask me, that’s not a particularly high bar to clear. I’d pick this burger over McD’s any day, but I still say it’s no Shake Shack, and on a California road trip I’d choose fish tacos instead every time. I’m thinking In-N-Out is one of those things you don’t fully understand the love for if you didn’t grow up with it — like scrapple, or the Goonies.

The veggie gf, a SoCal native, is a fervent In-N-Out pusher even though, as you might have guessed, she doesn’t do meat. Instead she orders the off-the-menu item seen above, an animal style “grilled cheese,” which is actually a cheeseburger with the burger part removed — lettuce, tomato, grilled onions, pickles, cheese and secret sauce layered on a hamburger bun. Not bad for fast food, but I’m still not a disciple. I also dispute the classification of calling any sandwich that’s less than 50 percent cheese a “grilled cheese”

So am I wrong or what? Are there non-Californians out there who understand the unadulterated love for In-N-Out, or will I just never get it?

in Rants & Raves / Red Meat / Veggie 11 comments
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