Month: April 2010

This Is Really Going To Screw Up My Authenticity

Apparently some of the folks at farmer’s market’s aren’t even farmers! The Wall Street Journal says that some produce vendors at your local greenmarket might just be folksy resellers who stocked up outside the city. Let’s call them fauxmers. Some markets are setting up inspection committees (like the Rembrandt committee?) to weed out these modern-day Bartles and Jaymes types. I’m personally hoping for a Clark Rockefeller scenario to play out, with the requisite “Law & Order” to follow.

I have gotten nearly every obsession of mine into the blog lately. Soon it won’t be about foodies at all, just my musings on culture.

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And His Wife Would Eat No Lean

He couldn’t eat toast because the bread was not rye. Pastries produced such an involuntary shudder that he might have been witness to a particularly gruesome crime scene. He would only consent to the yogurt on the strict condition he could add berries. And the (perfectly fine) hotel coffee was rejected, so after much research an assistant was dispatched to a coffee house as “Rene only allows himself caffeine once a day and it has to be the best”. If this is breakfast, lunch must be like the hundred year war.

Eating with a famous chef is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Slim Chips / Nutritionless, paper chips

From their site:

Slim Chips is an experiment around alternative types of snack food. The consumption of junk food is very often associated to habits and social rituals that help interrupt the flow of routinary daily activities more than to the hunger impulse. The basic ingredient here is edible paper, almost nutritionless. Don’t get fat, just eat nothing. It’s like eating tasty air, available in mint flavour, blueberry, cheddar or wasabi.

This is a paradoxical product that plays with weapons like irony and nonsense thus leaving the interpretation to the bravest consumers.

So now, you can 100% truly just shit your money out.  And if these guys don’t make you want to buy the super-ironic, fake snacks, who on earth could!?!

Chef/Slash

It’s like something Tyrone Power’s pirate character would have called for in The Black Swan before he took a huge swig from a stein, or a mug, or whatever pirates call their stout-drinking vessels.

Nanette Maxim, describing a Blood Orange Tart with Salted Caramel Sauce on slashfood.com. Also, I almost wish that “slashfood” was people writing fanfic about food. Almost.

Foodies Throughout History: Milton Hershey

Milton Hershey, O.F (Original Foodie)

“Hershey chose his rural location, for example, less from a desire to ensure his factory workers had access to healthy, rural air, than for strategic gain—deep in dairy-farming land to ensure a cheap supply of milk, but close enough to major cities (Philadelphia and New York) to allow cost-efficient distribution.” (from Edible Geography)

(One Man’s Vision:  Hershey, A Model Town available online in pdf, btw)

Shutterbugging

Some cameras, dear diners, now have a built-in “food” mode.

Alinea chef Grant Achatz, one of the nation’s most influential chefs, wrote in an online forum recently about the lengths diners will go to document their food — increasingly, with video cameras. He told of one diner whose camera was set on a tripod at the table.

Eye candy: Behind the lens with a food photographer :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Food

Shoot your own food porn! The Sun-Times is hosting a contest: if you take really really good pictures of your own food, then you can enter to win a half-day in the studio of another food photographer, watching HIM take pictures of food!

My head hurts. I think there’s probably a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too joke in here somewhere, but I’m missing it.

-Julia Childless