food news

iSnack 2.0 (Vegemite 2.0) and other bad product names

maki — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:39:19 +0200

Emerging briefly from the fray: Long time readers of Just Hungry may know that I am a huge fan of mysterious dark brown yeast extract products such as Marmite. (See my exhaustive comparison of Marmite, Vegemite and Cenovis.)

As a fan, this story in today’s morning news regarding the name for a new, ‘milder’ Vegemite (apparently they just mixed some cream cheese with original Vegemite …how, uhm, original) almost made me spit up my morning tea. I mean, the name is just begging to be mocked:

Apparently, the iSnack 2.0 name caused such an uproar in Australia that it has been scrapped, deservedly. Of course, the skeptic in me wonders if this was really a stupid executive decision or a devious marketing ploy. It does remind me of the New Coke brouhaha of the mid-80s, about which similar skepticism still lingers.

What other silly food marketing or naming decisions can you think of?

2 penny sausages

maki — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:45:38 +0200

Asda, a UK supermarket chain (and a wholly owned division of Wal-Mart), spurred no doubt by recent news about scarily rising food prices, has launched an attention grabbing product: the 2 p sausage. You do have to buy it in packs of 8, but a pack is still just 16p. In US cents that’s about 4 cents a sausage.

The sausages have been reduced, from 56p per package of 8. Even at that price the thought of what might go into such a cheap sausage makes me shudder. At 2p per sausage, it makes my stomach take a queasy flop.

Surely there are better ways of eating frugally than stuffing yourself with lumps of dubious chopped up mystery meat? (I love a really good sausage, but bad sausages are a very different matter.) If you’re in the UK, have you tried the 2p sausages, or would you consider trying them?

Elsewhere in the world, you can have a $175 burger topped with gold leaf and foie gras, which may not even be that good. Something’s off kilter somewhere.

2008 will be the International Year of the Potato

maki — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:56:15 +0200

Next year, the United Nations wants us to celebrate the humble potato for an entire year. I’m not certain how the UN makes its decisions about such things (why not the Year of the Tomato or the Year of the Turnip?), but I have no objections against the humble potato, one of my favorite foods. Unless you are an avowed anti-carb person, how could you not love the potato? As a matter of fact, I do wonder if someone at the UN came up with the Potato Year idea to combat the anti-potato sentiments in certain developed and weight-obsessed countries.

Potatoes are really the ultimate comfort food. For me they rank right up there with a bar of milk chocolate in the I-may-regret-it-later but boy-I-need-it category. The best bowl of comfort in the world is a creamy mound of mashed potatoes, which I’ve written about before. (I do however use a ricer now instead of a masher, for a lighter texture.) If I want a bit of texture or variation to the mash, I make it into a champ (add chopped up green onions that have been poached a bit in hot milk) or do something low-rent and add canned sweet corn and crisply fried bacon bits. Ahh, potatoes and bacon. What could be better.

Here is the official site for the International Year of the Potato, which has lots of educational facts, but inexplicably lacks any recipes. I want to know how they eat potatoes all over world, especially in the Andes where the spud originated! Let’s hope they’ll add some recipes when the Year officially kicks off.

Some other potato recipes on Just Hungry:

Besides the mashed, I wrote about Rösti and Oven-fried potatoes.
Pommes Anna - a ruinously rich, time consuming and delicious dish. Plus a variation with truffles.
Nikujaga, stewed potatoes and meat - real Japanese home cooking!
Japanese potato salad is the best potato salad.
Shepherd’s pie and a not very classic (but tasty) fish pie, both topped with mashed potatoes.
Pae de queijo the very easy way, made with potato.

Food Stamp Budget post followup

maki — Wed, 16 May 2007 17:31:26 +0200

Following up to my previous post about food stamp budget experiments:

Rebecca has left a comment, where she points out she is following the USDA Thrifty Meal Plan, on which food stamp benefits are based. This is where her budget figure of $74 per week for 2 people (not $74 per day as I erroneously typed…that’s sort of generous!) comes from, which comes out to $5.30 per day per person.

Actually another blogger did a month-long Thrifty Meal Plan experiment 2 years ago, though she did not stipulate organic/local as Rebecca is doing. Half Changed World ate on the Thrifty Food plan for a month (followup posts are here, here, here, here and the final wrapup.) She had the additional challenge of feeding her two small children, including one who was (is) a picky eater, as well as her husband.

(It seems quite illogical to me that the food budget or food stamp allocation is the same for all people, whether it’s a tiny baby or a growing hungry teenager. But I guess that’s government for you.)

A few more links:

Some conservative political blogs have called the various politicians’ food stamp experiments to be lies since people actually get more food assistance. I disagree with calling the politicos liars - they are politicians, and out to make a (valid) point. Just as a matter of interest however, there are several other food assistance programs available from the federal government. There may be more from individual states, but that varies so much that I haven’t researched this in depth.

The USDA has issued a recipe and meal planning booklet (publication year 2006) called Recipes and Tips for Thrifty, Healthy Meals (PDF). At the moment that link produces a 404 though, so until it returns (hopefully it will) you can search for the document on Google and view the cached version. It has some budgeting tips that can be useful for anyone, such as making a list before going grocery shopping, planning meals ahead, batch cooking and “planned leftovers”.

What they do in Switzerland

I was rather curious as to how other countries dealt with the problem of feeding the poor, especially where I live now. In Switzerland welfare programs are managed at the canton level (cantons are sort of like states in the US but with more autonomy). People below the poverty line get financial and other assistance, but nothing like food stamps per se. Instead, eligible people are issued ID cards so that they can buy food at designated charity groceries at a discount, or for a very nominal fee. Here is a story about such a supermarket in Zürich. From another Swissinfo article, it seems the charity supermarkets fill the role that is filled by food banks and food pantries in the U.S. - the big difference being that the people still have to pay for the groceries.

(It’s important to note that Switzerland has a very low percentage of people living under the official poverty line: as of 2005, that number is 6.9% nationwide, compared to 15.4% for the UK, and 21.9% for the United States. (source) In other words, the ‘poverty problem’ in proportion to the general population is much smaller.)

Canned ravioli days

Reading the USDA Thrifty Meals document mentioned above reminded me of a brief period when I was sometimes really hungry. Back in my early 20s, I was living on my own and very broke. After paying rent, transportation, utilities and such, my disposable income was around $250. It was my first time living alone, so I didn’t really know how to cook for one - my previous cooking had been for the family and I was used to making amounts that were much larger than I needed for just myself. And, having grown up in a rather food-centric home it wasn’t easy to be budget conscious. So, I sent away for a ‘budget meal planning’ booklet from the government, very similar to the one here. (Remember when the address to write to for stuff from the government was in Pueblo, Colorado? I wonder if it still is.) Once I got the booklet, the shopping and planning tips were useful but I couldn’t even bring myself to try to recipes. They all sounded grey-brown and tasteless. The choice of meat was turkey, especially ground turkey, which I have always hated.

Luckily, I lived at the time in a place (Flushing, Queens) where shopping cheaply for varied and exciting food was, and still is, quite easy, due to the ethnically varied population. So I was able to adjust my buying patterns and live pretty well on something like a $50 per week food budget (which included things like shampoo, soap and toilet paper), while ignoring ground turkey. This is when I first developed my love for Indian food incidentally, which has lots of inexpensive, tasty and cheering (spicy flavors, bright colors) food. Looking back, I think I can even say that this tight-budget period made me a better cook.

The thing with cooking for one though is that when you are tired, depressed or otherwise feeling out of it, you just don’t cook. (With others to cook for you force yourself to do it for their sake, or get another person to do it.) Now generally speaking I had a pretty good life, with friends and a job and family nearby to keep me cheerful, and I knew that my very tight finances would improve eventually. Besides, I was 20. And I had no dependents, except for my cat. But in those occasional down periods, what kept me going were, of course, pre-prepared foods. Especially canned ravioli and pasta. (Not Spaghetti-Os, the generic brand equivalents.) I don’t know what I would have done without the 3-for-a-dollar cans of ravioli. (You might think that I’d have gone for instant ramen, given my background, but I’d had it deeply ingrained in me by my mother that instant ramen = empty calories.)

My point here is though is that to cook regularly, every day, and to plan and budget and connive to get the best food possible on the table, it takes motivation and a positive attitude. When you are poor and feel stuck there, those things may be in shorter supply than cheap, unhealthy food. There’s also the matter of education about nutrition, cooking and budgeting, as Rebecca brings up.

Also see: You are what you grow, an op-ed piece by Michael Pollan that originally appeared in the NY Times. One thing it mentions is that the cheap, processed calories are so much cheaper than the fresh, healthy ones.

Food Stamp Budget experimenters

maki — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:39:13 +0200

[The following has been edited to correct some things from the original posting and add a couple of links. Serious Eats lists some more congresspeople participating.]

Last year the most popular food plan experiment was “eating local”. This year so far it seems to be “eating on a food stamp budget”. The main reason for this is upcoming debate on the 2007 farm bill. Bush administration is proposing to make big cuts in food assistance for the poor, a large part of which would mean cuts to the food stamp program. [Edit: as an anonymous commenter pointed out, that was a link to an article about the 2005 farm bill cuts.] (A NY Times editorial about the subject [Edit: this actually is about the 2007 Farm Bill :)].) So a number of politicians are doing the Food Stamp Budget Experiment at least in part to protest against this.

Here are the ones I’ve found so far (Note, some of these links were already posted to my del.icio.us, so my apologies for the duplicates if you follow that also.)

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski seems to be the first one to start this.
Councilman Eric Gioia from Queens, NY has run out of money (on a $28 per week budget) and is now relying on food from a food pantry. Earlier, New York Magazine was quite snarky about his experiment, to which Joe Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger who is also participating in the experiment, replied. (A food pantry, for non-USens, is a non-government, usually charity-run place where people can go for food, which is donated in the form of actual food or money to buy food from the public. The NYCCAH mentioned above and America’s Second Harvest are examples of groups who run food pantries.)
Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson from Missouri is trying it also, on a $3 per day budget.
So is Congressman James McGovern from Massachusetts. [Edit: His (and his wife’s) blog about the experience.] Emerson and McGovern are co-sponsoring a “Nutrition Bill”.
[Added on May 17th] Congressman Tim Ryan (Dem. Ohio) is also participating, and blogging about it.
Salt Lake (Utah) County Mayor Peter Corroon, Governor Jon Hunstman Jr. and State Representatives Jennifer Seelig and John Dougall (additional link)

All of these politicians seem to be sticking to the $3-a-day-per-person budget. As mentioned here previously, blogger Rebecca Blood is conducting a month-long experiment in this vein, though she’s allowing herself a $74 per day week budget (for two people), and adding the additional challenge of eating organic food. [Edit: see my followup post.] She seems to be doing quite well so far, eating lots of fresh vegetables, pulses and grains. On the other hand Councilman Eric Gioia, who went shopping with the assistance of a mother who had raised a family on food stamps, and bought things like ramen noodles, white bread (cheaper than whole wheat), canned tuna, peanut butter, isn’t doing very well. I suspect that more people who are actually in situations where they have to rely on food stamps shop more like the councilman than like Rebecca.

It does strike me that the councilman’s diet sounds suspiciously like that of a typical ‘starving’ student’s though, which is probably why a lot of the commenters on this Digg post seem to think it’s not a big deal.