ethics

I just realised that Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, the BBC Three show that brings you into a real working abattoir, is also back for another series (season) starting tonight at 10:30PM BT/11:30PM CET (also repeated at 12:45AM/1:45AM). I mentioned it yesterday as one of my top food TV shows of last year. It will be shown every night for this week, and the lineup looks interesting, to say the least. They are going for the baby animals...

• Monday (today): Suckling Pig
• Tuesday: Kid Goat
• Wednesday: Veal
• Thursday: Milk Fed Lamb
• Friday: Omnibus (recap of the week I guess)

For more information, see the BBC Three site.

We received a PR release the other day from LeShop, Migros' home food delivery web site, that they are no longer going to be selling traditionally raised (with the _gavage_ method of force-feeding) foie gras to German speaking Switzerland. This didn't come about because of government legislation, but apparently was a decision made by Migros, following the results of customer surveys which were overwhelmingly against gavage.

As I've mentioned her before several times, I'm not a diehard locavore. But I do try to keep an eye on how far my food has travelled to get to me. Admittedly, many of my seasonings and such have travelled a long way, because I need my Japanese food and I'm here in the middle of Europe. For fresh produce and meats and things like that I do try to buy things that haven't travelled too far as much as I can. I think I've fairly typical in that respect these days.

Yesterday, the Soil Association in Britain, a highly inflluential charitable organization, announced that in a year, they will only certify food that is air shipped into the country as organic if it also met fair trade standards. Since some thought that they should stop certifying any imported fresh food as organic, this looks like a compromise on their part. Even if on the surface organic and fair trade don't have much to do with each other, in the realm of fuzzy good-feeling consumerism they are certainly related.

I don't think that enough study has been done yet on just how greener locally produced food is though. As I've written about here before, food produced in cold to temperate climates with short growing seasons requires a lot of energy. It's probably beyond the scope of organizations like the Soil Association at this point in time to try to address complicated issues like that though. Far easier to place restrictions and requirements on far-flung producers with little or no political power.

Buy organic, support fair trade. Avoid trans-fats and simple sugars. Avoid additives and chemicals and extraneous packaging. Hope there are no harmful bacteria. Oh yes, and worry about the rising cost of food too. I used to love going to the supermarket. I still do mostly, but these days that enjoyment is tinged with a lot of stress.

(See also: should the supermarkets pre-edit our choices? Personally, even with all the thinking and decision-making that's required I'd rather make my own choices.)

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.)

[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.)

Yesterday, I found out that one of the most talented sushi chefs I've ever known had died. He was still relatively young (in his 50s). He was at one time one of the itamae at the late, lamented Sushisay in New York.

The authorities are investigating the cause of his death. They have to do this, because his body was found in his bath, at least a month after he had died.

Yesterday, I had some takeout sushi that was so terrible that I still shudder, more than 24 hours later, thinking about it.

No it didn't make me physically sick. I did not get food poisoning. But it was bloody awful. It was sold as 'fresh' sushi (and it certainly hadn't been frozen), but it had been refrigerated for some time, for who knows how long. (It had a 'sell-by date' but not a 'made-on date'. Sushi must, must, be eaten the same day it's made.) The rice was mealy, the grains hard. The neta (the fish) on the nigiri, salmon and tuna, was mushy and utterly tasteless. The rolls, filled with cucumber and some sort of tuna mix, were no better.

Some years ago, when silicon baking wares came out, I jumped on them with glee. No more scraping off baked on crud from the baking sheets! Muffins that popped right up with no greasing of the cups required! Easy washing up!

But these days I've definitely fallen out of love with silicon sheets and silicon muffin pans and the like.

About those muffin pans first: while muffins do brown on the outsides, they don't get as crispy-brown as I'd like. They also seem to rise a bit less than I'd like.

Also, they are totallly useless for popovers and Yorkshire puddings. You can't really heat them up, so you can't make them piping hot and pour in hot batter. The alternative method for making popovers 'pop' is to start them in a cold oven, but that doesn't work either. So I end up with flat, boring muffins of a sort, rather than high and airy pockets of trapped air and eggy, moist insides. Yes, I know I could just get separate pans for the popover and Yorkshire puddings, but I don't have that much storage space in my not-too-large kitchen, and I like to avoid 'single-use' type equipment as much as possible.

As for silicon baking sheets, used to line heavy baking sheets, they do okay on the browning front. But what I dislike about them is that, after a few uses they take on an unpleasantly 'greasy' feel to them. No amount of washing or soaking in soapy water seems to cure that. I don't know if I'm over-sensitive to this, but it drives me nuts. So I end up throwing them out over maybe 3 uses. This doesn't seem too economicalor environmentally friendly to me. (Do those things disintegrate at all in landfills?)

So, I'm back to good old metal baking tins and lining my baking sheets with kitchen parchment paper. My old metal muffin pans tend to stick a bit on the bottoms, so for delicate cupcakes and such I just use paper cupcake liners. (Which means of course I avoid those individual silicon cupcake cups.) Paper, at least, does disintegrate after a while.

How do you feel about those silicon baking products? Do you love them or hate them?