Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 27

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Belgian supermarket Delhaize launched a wine collection featuring cork figures for the different regions (right).

• The heirloom and live food trends meet in Eternal Yogurt: The Starter That Lives Forever If you're set on store-bought, get some tips from this yogurt smackdown: A Frenchman, a Greek, and a Turk walk into a conference room to rank New York–made Greek yogurts. Spoons, predictably, fly.

• An amazing project of food, history and identity, The Southern Discomfort Tour, by the Cooking Gene. Michael Twitty explains the project in an essay entitled The cook who picks cotton: reclaiming my roots. "Slavery is not just a practice or moment in American history; it is a metaphor for our relationships to lifestyles and food systems that many of us view as beyond our control. Most of us are enslaved to food systems that aren’t sustainable, but eat we must. And because we must eat, food is a natural vehicle for telling the kinds of stories about historical slavery and the impact of “race” on how we eat, even as we critique and question our contemporary food politics. Food is our vehicle to move beyond race and into relationships and use those relationships to promote the kind of racial reconciliation and healing, our nation desperately needs."

• It's Derby Weekend. Bartender Chris McMillian rhapsodizes on the poetry of the perfect Mint Julep. "I don’t typically stir my Julep up...Each sip progressively takes you there and each sip is different from the one preceding it. Few drinks have that multidimensionality, building to the crescendo—which I think is the payoff of the Julep—of the bourbon and the mint together."

• Using vintage inspiration in packaging to answer a desire for authenticity makes news in the wine and spirits world. "We needed to bring the heritage back to the packaging.”

• Since we've got a bit of a drinks theme going on this week, Virgin Atlantic is now serving drinks with Richard Branson vanity ice cubes to passengers in Upper Class. Stephen Colbert has already mocked it (video).

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 24

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• Snack as an art form (above) with the Mona Lisa in plum.

• Food styling bolsters its design cred as the trend for pantone cooking continues to a lovely cabbage soup, Pantone 268 C.

• Camel milk chocolates and lattes — a traditional food finds new opportunities in modern tastes in Dubai with video of dairy camels (you saw it here first).

• Is it possible for bacon to jump the shark? A new bacon reality show just might do it. And Burger King has debuted a bacon sundae.

• It's time to talk about the Farm Bill again. "The second half of April could determine whether or not we’ll have government support for sustainable farm and food programs for the next five years."

• Chinese consumers are spreading their love of wine to regions around the world and could help boost new tastes. "Crucially, they are adventurous consumers open to wines from various countries and regions with new styles and flavours"

• From the land of gadgets comes a new Japanese creation, SushiBots — that's robots that make sushi.

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 23

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Chocolate magic (right) is an Alice in Wonderland take on sweets.

• With Easter coming up, we have eggs on the brain. The continuing popularity of the urban chicken trend and other city farm pursuits has prompted a new agrarian product line from Williams-Sonoma that includes stylish chicken coops, as well as DIY cheese kits and shitake mushroom-growing logs.

• Backyard chickens have resulted in an egg surplus for some: "When the whole coop starts laying, she said, the supply of eggs quickly turns into an “I Love Lucy”-style conveyor belt scene, bringing absurd, unmanageable excess." Quiche, custards and meringue — oh my!

• Not only can you eat eggs, but you can turn their shells into works of art.

• And not only can you eat marshmallow Peeps, you can turn them into art. Curious about where these crazy Easter icons come from? Take a peak behind the marshmallow curtain.

• A Pork Fairy approved app for iPad that walks cooks through making bacon, pancetta and more: The Better Bacon Book.

• Good coverage on the "Eat it to Save it" argument for conservation: "Are we willing to make complex and multi-layered choices to respectfully protect something so it continues to survive and even thrive?"

• Daredevil eating in Tokyo will get even more exciting as regulations on who can serve fugu ease. "I don't want people to forget that you can actually die from eating blowfish...I feel the government's awareness of this has diminished."

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 22

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Too pretty to eat, pantone tarts by Emilie Guelpa.

• Mountain-city-saliva-chicken anyone? There's a new campaign in China to make menu translations less literal (and less gross).

• Pesticides and the fate of the honey bee: Three new studies link bee decline to Bayer Pesticide. Their products are used on corn, soy and more.

• Those crazy cephalopods, one minute you see them, the next minute they've turned into something else... rare footage of the mimic octopus.

• An Atlantic vintage? A Pacific vintage? "You can think of the world’s oceans as a kind of rich broth. They’re full of salt, of course, but they also contain other ingredients, many of them vital to marine life and to the processes that control the Earth’s climate." Not strictly a food story, but we appreciated the metaphor.

• One more story from the deep: Unlocking Seaweed’s Next-Gen Crude — Sugar (although intended more for cars and fertilizer than doughnuts).

• Feeling nostalgic for one of our favorite culinary innovators, we happened on this Swedish Chef collection. Bork! Bork! Bork!

• Usually, we go looking for the bizarre. Occasionally, it shows up in our mailbox, like this promotion for a bacon coffin. "We think that your final resting place deserves the eternal glory that is bacon." And Penelope the Pork Fairy says, "Amen."

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 21

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• Have cheesey dreams in a tent inspired by food (above).

• There may not be an app to satisfy your nutella cravings, but Dutch designer Julian Burford has translated popular food packaging into the style of iPhone apps.

• Why not give cookbook ghostwriters credit? Let's not pretend that everyone can do everything.

• Officials in Linköping, Sweden broke ground on an 18 story greenhouse located in town to be built by Plantagon. It will be "A new type of greenhouse for vertical farming; an international Centre of Excellence for Urban Agriculture; a demo-plant for Swedish clean-tech and a climate-smart way to use excess heating and CO2 from industries."

• Chipotle discusses its use of social media: "Likes and retweets are great, but what matters most to Chipotle is genuine conversations with customers. Through these conversations, the social media team can share knowledge and gain insights that will ultimately make Chipotle restaurants even better."

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 19

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• Food and art cross-pollinate on the site Feasting on Art (image from site above). Read more in this Saveur profile.

• The moving target that is sustainable seafood, and how chefs should make sourcing decisions got more attention in the Boston Globe. "The public perception of chefs is that we operate in some sort of sphere that only has to do with idea and ideologies.  We have a lot of practical considerations."

• Could southern Appalachia become a new world truffle capital? "The next few years are the moment of truth for the burgeoning industry,"says Tom Michaels, owner of Tennessee Truffle.

• Chefs differ in their enthusiasm for Yelp and making everyone a critic. Sometimes it's not half bad: "It used to be that if you got a bad review in the New York Times, you had to close. It was like the theater. There was only one guy who decided everything. There are so many more people reviewing everything today. Nowadays, if you get a bad review in the Times, you can still make it.”

• Kids can now play a host of new farm-centric games on the computer, but they're more Big Ag than CSA.

• For grown-up students who want to get series about farming, college extension programs are offering more for small plot and urban farmers.

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 18

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Where product creativity goes bad, from bacon mints (above) to pickle juice pops and "perky jerky."

• Fashion, food and entertainment continue to cross-pollinate as legendary Parisian patisserie Ladurée starts a cosmetics line and the legendary and the until now fictional Duff beer of The Simpsons becomes a reality. 

• If you thought bacon and mint sounded weird, how about champagne and graffiti for a real high-low mash up. Moët & Chandon has teamed up with graffiti artist André for a limited edition "Tag your love" packaging for its Rosé Impérial champagne. (video at bottom of the page is priceless)

• Kids playing with their food is getting more sophisticated with an animated introduction to Michael Pollan's Food Rules.

• The latest farmer-chef collaboration getting some buzz — bespoke syrups.

• Food trucks are for retailers too. The San Francisco craft butcher shop Avendano's has started Avendano's Meat Wagon: "The truck project was really so we could reach a larger audience and meet people who are new to the concept of getting whole animals and breaking them down."

• Offal poetry: Who knew that Robert Frost put his interactions with sweetbreads into verse:

"You drive me to confess in ink:
Once I was fool enough to think
That brains and sweetbreads were the same,
Till I was caught and put to shame,
First by a butcher, then a cook,
Then by a scientific book.
But 'twas by making sweetbreads do
I passed with such a high I.Q."

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 16

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• It's not just the sugar that will kill you... Cereal killers (left, and more) has some fun with the pop culture form.

• Is seafood charcuterie taking menus by storm in 2012? Reports from Boston and LA think so.

• The USDA is giving more grants to farmers for developing value-added products. “The local food movement really took off with most folks selling direct through farmers markets and CSAs, and that’s great, and yet 97 percent of the food consumed in America goes through the wholesale markets. So if we’re really going to create new markets for family farmers and cut food miles, we have to figure out how to get into these markets.”

• The trend of high-end vinegars we've been hoping for seems to be on the move, with honey wine, verjus and Mexican banana.

• Invasive species burgers could be the solution to a wild iguana population. Puerto Rico will begin hunting and exporting the meat. "This is a very big problem. We have to attack it...It has impacted structures, the economy, crops and the ecosystem." Unfortunately, the Burmese pythons destroying South Florida mammal populations aren't so easy to catch.

• Maine looks for new ways to keeping fishing and fishing culture alive. "I've got all kinds of fisheries policy people, I've got all kinds of fisheries scientists. But we don't have anybody that creates that link back to shore-side business side of commercial fishing, and you can't have one without the other. We need the healthy fisheries, but we have to make sure we have a link back to the shore-side business that supports the sale and development of fish or lobsters or clams or anything else it might be."

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 14

 a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• Old ideas get new packaging with Slow Fast Food (above).

• Using any available space, the pothole gardener strikes London.

• And what can go in those potholes is changing, as global climate change opens up crazy prospects like figs in Boston. The government plant hardiness map is catching up with the new reality.

• Old-school kitchen frugality is elevated to a trend as chefs turn scraps into stunning second acts. “It helps in the cost of running a business and it’s respect for the product. That speaks louder than just the food.”

• Dropping cod quotas in Gloucester, MA predict a loss of $70 million for the community. It show the heartbreak of a town that's tied to a wild fishery. Aquaculture could play a role in keeping people on the water and food on the table like it is in Europe.

• On the new solutions front, tech start-ups are cropping up to help with farm to table connections.

• Going right to the source, chefs and farmers join forces, briding the kitchen-field divide and resulting in better ingredients. "There are so many parallels, business-wise, between a farm and restaurant operations that often people on both sides don't see."

• UK farms are using permaculture design to survive and prosper.

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 13

 a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Waffle of sugar cone is a now a choice for light fixtures (above)

• The much anticipated TEDxManhattan "Changing the Way We Eat" is happening this Saturday, January 21st, starting at 10:30 AM EST at the Times Center in New York City. If you can't be there in person, join a local viewing party or watch online.

• A food idea that we hope turns into a bona fide trend: high end vinegar used behind the bar. This week we warmed up with Gingras, an aged apple cider vinegar from an orchard in Quebec, in a rum-based cocktail.  Innovators wanted.

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 11

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

 

• The perfect slice: Ohio artist, Dennis Wojtkiewicz explores the sensitive nature of time in his oversized oil paintings of fruit (above).

• Authenticity is the flavor of the new year, says NPR (and the rest of us): "What might be called urban neo-ruralism has apartment dwellers canning tomatoes, keeping bees and churning butter. The small farmer is the new gastronomic superhero, sourced on restaurant menus." Expect more craft butchers, more unusual meat (at least for Americans) like goat and rabbit, and more small batch distilling.

• All this artisan stuff is actually real business. Hyper-local markets provide big economic boost in San Francisco and across the country. "This is about jobs, the economy and community vitality....It's created a renaissance in agriculture and that's very exciting." Local Roots Market in Ohio got press as a smart new version of a farmers market. Said one participating farmer: “We won’t be slaves. We will be able to make a business.”

• Southern farmers profiled in the New York Times describe "a thriving movement of idealistic Southern food producers who have a grander plan than just farm-to-table cuisine. They want to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions and dignity, and if all goes according to plan, completely redefine American cuisine for a global audience."

• Farmers forging partnerships is key to building regional food systems. "Food has really been the bridge that has healed the urban-rural divide."

• Looking across to Italy, we see farmers carving out new economic niches to flourish, with women-run farms ahead of the curve. Some farms are even offering day care centers as part of the mix. "The involvement of women in multifunctional agriculture has helped society in important ways 'like food security, rural development and the safeguarding of the natural landscape.'”