Zester Daily

Egg Recall Reveals Scrambled Priorities

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:51:23 +0100

The recall of a half billion eggs from two Iowa agribusinesses, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, because of salmonella contamination is still dominating the news. Earlier last month the news was the withdrawal of a million pounds of E. coli tainted hamburger. That was ...

Foodies at the Museum

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:00:00 +0100

Chef competitions on TV, front-page articles in daily newspapers, cover stories in mainstream magazines: Everyone, it seems, is talking, writing, blogging, dreaming about food. And getting serious about it. We're finally gaining some much-needed civic momentum to do something about obesity, about our food safety standards, about salt and suga ...

Growing Demand for All Things Organic

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:22:28 +0100

By now, any chef worth her salt will extol the virtues of organic produce. Whether tomatoes grown using synthetic chemicals will hold their own in a taste test against an untainted harvest is rarely even up for debate. That food grown without pesticides, herbicides, hormones ...

New Spin on Back to the Land

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:10:27 +0100

A computer whiz asked me out to dinner many years ago, back when Silicon Valley was just bursting into being. The guy lived in East Palo Alto in a funky, hand-built house. I was charmed. But the minute I walked through the door I sensed something amiss. No smell of onions or ...

Debunking Myths About Agriculture

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:29:52 +0100

Organic agriculture, wrote political scientist Robert Paarlberg in a recent Foreign Policy article, is just a "trendy cause" ...

Women Are Changing Food

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:04:38 +0100

Women have long been stalwarts of sustainable food and farming. They're in charge of more than 85 percent of household spending, run their food businesses with sustainability at the core of operations, are most often in charge of feeding their families, and direct and staff more than 60 percent of the positions in sustainable agricult ...

Going Organic in the Yard

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:37:30 +0100

More and more home gardeners are growing their own food this year. Plant nurseries and seed companies showed sales of vegetable seedlings and fruit trees on the rise this spring. For the most part, more garden geeks is fantastic news. But here's my dilemma: Are these new home gardeners going to ...

Fruit on the Skids

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:47:32 +0100

I worry about fruit. I wonder where its flavor has gone. I brood over its absence of sensuality -- when fruit is all about being sensual. I watch with alarm the demise of its overall quality. Quantity we don't have to worry about, apparently, for supermarkets are over ...

Fooling the World, Not Feeding It

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:23:20 +0100

"Dark roast coffee has more caffeine than light roast." "Wear a scarf and you won't catch a cold." "We need genetically modified crops to feed the world." There are some assertions you hear so often that it's easy to believe they must be true. I live in central Illinois, the ...

Poetry in a Bottle

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:39:05 +0100

My introduction to fine wine and creative wine description began in the mid-1960s when my father enrolled in a wine appreciation class at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York and started to bring bottles home. He also brought a long list of adjectives for articulating the experience. My younger brothers and ...

The Hands That Feed Us

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:04:02 +0100

Over the years working on and around migrant workers issues, I have often felt that people in the food world remain more concerned with the providence of a rare organic mushroom than the harsh conditions farm laborers (documented and undocumented alike) face every day of their working life to cultivate that mushroom. Though farm worker ...

A Harvest for 9.2 Billion

Wed, 19 May 2010 23:28:27 +0100

The number of people on Earth is expected to shoot up from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. How will we feed them? If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, and farm workers will be exposed to more and more chemicals. And st ...

Who Will Eat the Last Bluefin?

Wed, 12 May 2010 15:47:33 +0100

Bluefin are having a bad year. It started in January on a rough winter sea on Japan's Tsugaru Strait, where the Sea of Japan touches the Pacific. Small fish are drawn to these fertile waters, which in turn feed huge tuna, making them rich and fatty. A small boat expertly lands one particular bluefin using live bait and a single-hook hand-line technique called ippon zuri. Th ...

Winning the Great Tomato War

Wed, 05 May 2010 13:03:39 +0100

While I was traveling and writing "Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato," I ended up on the southernmost tip of Mexico's Baja Peninsula one April morning. For the past 25 years, a couple named Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin have run a business that employs thousands of peasant farmers growing small cherry, pear and plum to ...

Listening to the Honeybees

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:00:00 +0100

This spring marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a time when citizens around the globe celebrate the bountiful blue planet and the fruits of its earth. Yet, something this year just isn't right. Worldwide we are entering into the fourth consecutive year of tens of billions of dead Italian honeybees. Is the honeybee trying to tell us something? Have ...

Dumpster Dining and Roadkill Gourmet

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0100

"What's that?" Erik leaned forward to peer through the windshield. It was night, and a searing, cold wind swept snow across the roads, turning patches of Vermont's Interstate 89 to ice. The landscape looked lunar and foreboding â and deadly. Already, barely 20 minutes into our quest, we had passed a Toyota truck lying on its side ...

Cultivate Cooks, Not Just Gardens

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:42:47 +0100

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day," go the words of wisdom from Chinese philsopher Lao Tzu. "Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." But what about teaching him how to cook the fish? From a gardening perspective, it appears that we have a food revolution happening in this country. Michelle Ob ...

The Art of Mindful Eating

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:37:15 +0100

To eat or not to eat? Thatâs not the question. What's more important is to understand our relationship with food. In this age of high-tech living, we often find ourselves in a hurry, trying to catch up. At times, it seems that we are riding on a tidal wave, not knowing where we are heading. Eating on the run is becoming ...

The Taste of Climate Change

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:15:43 +0100

When it comes to dealing with climate change, I realize that saving wine is not at the top of most people's agendas. Those of us who make wine, however, know that vineyards are the canaries in the coal mine. Minor shifts in temperature and weather patterns, unnoticed by most people, are already altering our win ...

With a Dash of Secrecy

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:31:30 +0100

I did not know much about the American food industry when I began working on the documentary film "Food Inc." I had no preconceived point of view. I thought I would talk with all of the people who produce our food and I would learn from them. Pretty simple. And pretty wrong. This world, the world that feeds so many, was off-limits to a filmmaker like me. Walls went up ...