hyphenated - Filed under 'food'

October 13, 2009 9:47 AM

savoring fall

autumnal [\ȯ-ˈtəm-nəl\] adj

of, occurring in, or characteristic of autumn
characteristic of late maturity verging on decline

❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧

The sun lays low in the sky and dips below the horizon earlier every day while flora and fauna brace themselves for the first hard frost of the season. Scarves emerge from closest and sandals reluctantly take their place in the darkness. Heavy humidity evaporates and the air alternates between damp and crisp, depending on whether the sky is an endless expanse of glorious blue or a low ceiling of matte, sombre grey. Summer has graciously retired and fall has arrived to advise that winter is en route to aggressively take its place.

In this corner of the world, fall is accompanied by birds noisily announcing their synchronized migration, fields producing the last gifts of the harvest, and trees making bold, fiery statements before going bald. Crimson, copper, gold, and amber leaves tremble and waver in the wind and, when they lose their grip, gracefully float to the ground.

Crunching through leaves along the forest path. The welcome warmth of the sun streaming between branches is subdued and easily stolen by the breeze. Sweet scents of decay rise from the ground along with memories of childhood screeches and giggles from when the chore of raking morphed into a game of diving into a crispy yet soft pile of browning leaves.

Giving thanks for the comforts of home. Heat radiating from the fire. Laughs and stories shared with family and friends. Pumpkin pie and fresh apples.

Click here to download:

savoring_fall.zip (232 KB)

Filed under // Canada family & friends food Quebec & Montreal

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October 9, 2009 6:15 AM

when chicken is an institution

As many readers of this blog know, I'm not a big meat eater. When I do eat meat, I tend towards organic/small farm options. However, there are rare exceptions. One of those exceptions is barbecued chicken. And not any barbecued chicken, only Châlet Bar-B-Q rotisserie chicken.

Like most cities, Montreal has its specialities when it comes to food, namely bagels, smoked meat, and rotisserie chicken. I never really got on the smoked meat bandwagon (I like it, but there's something fundamentally wrong with a sandwich that contains more meat than bread, in my opinion), but I'm all over the bagels and the rotisserie chicken.

Rotisserie chicken is the only of the aforementioned specialities that is quebecois to the core, as the other two have Jewish roots (Montreal is the home to the second largest Jewish community outside of Israel, after NYC). The argument could be made that my fondness for rotisserie chicken is in my blood, as my surname would have been Beauchamp-Berthelet if our society was matriarchal rather than patriarchal.

The ubiquity of rotisserie chicken in Quebec is epitomized by la sauce. When someone says la sauce in Quebec, they are most likely referring to this sauce, which was developed by les frères Berthelet (the brothers happen to be my great uncles, but I've never met them - I'm not on the gravy train).

When it comes to rotisserie chicken, Châlet Bar-B-Q in NDG is an institution. Recently voted the best rotisserie chicken in Montreal, Châlet Bar-B-Q doesn't seem to have changed much since it opened over sixty years ago. The decor is classic, with wood panelling on the walls, dim lighting, booths, and waitresses in outdated uniforms. And the chicken, served with fries, gravy, and a toasted bun, is unbeatable. Kevin and I went for lunch earlier this week and were not disappointed. If you're visiting Montreal, be sure to add Châlet Bar-B-Q, along with Schwartz's and St-Viateur, to your list of places to visit.

Photo owned by alanah.montreal (cc)

Filed under // family & friends food Quebec & Montreal

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September 19, 2009 11:25 AM

got milk?

Recent dairy-related news, from Lily and the CBC, got me thinking about milk. The CBC story concluded that "despite decades of being largely exempt from free market forces, farmers have not been protected by governments from the global financial crisis that caused demand to crash" while Lily noted that "dairy farmers are experiencing a tough time. Of the price paid by us consumers for a litre of milk, 37% goes to the processor, 42% goes to the supermarket and a miserable 21% goes to the farmer" in Ireland.

The times are changing or perhaps, as the information above suggests, they have already changed. Is what was once considered a staple of the North American and European diet becoming less ubiquitous? Are dairy farms becoming less viable?

If the trend in my own consumption of milk is any indication, it would seem that the answer is yes. Over the past five years, my personal consumption of milk has decreased substantially. Growing up, a glass of milk with dinner was the norm and through CEGEP and my undergrad a bowl of Cheerios with milk was my typical breakfast. Now, I will occasionally have a glass of milk - usually to accompany chocolate, cake, or cookies. The reasoning behind the decline in my milk consumption is rooted in a few factors, the largest probably being my relationship and cohabitation with an Asian man. As his consumption of meat has dropped since we started living together, so has my intake of milk.

Obviously, I'm not prepared to defend the claim that my dietary fluctuations are in any way representative so I did some research. A few findings, based on USDA data:

Consumption of milk is dropping

Consumption of sweet dairy products is on the rise

Consumption of savory dairy products is also increasing

Subsidies
Forecasted Milk income loss program payments in 2009: $1.1 billion

The USDA Farm Service Agency's (FSA) MILC Program supports the dairy industry by providing direct counter-cyclical style payments to milk producers on a monthly basis when the Boston Federal Milk Marketing Order Class I price for fluid milk falls below the benchmark of $16.94 per hundredweight (cwt.) Source

Prices (The first graph is 2008 data)

Click here to download:

got_milk.zip (29 KB)

I'm sure I've only just scratched the surface in the depth and breadth of my research, but the preliminary results seem interesting nonetheless.

The data I dug up and presented here shows the trend away from the consumption of unadulterated milk, which seems to coincide with the obsolescence of milkmen. As an aside, there are little wooden boxes with doors that have been nailed shut embedded in the walls beside each door in my building. I can only guess that they were for the daily milk delivery because they're about the same size as a milk bottle (which I'm lucky enough to still be able to purchase my milk in, thanks to Avalon).

Consumption of value-added dairy products is one the rise (although demand for eggnog seems stable), but farmers get a smaller cut of the revenues on the sale of these products as compared to milk. As a result, the overall share of the value transmitted to the farmer is going down.

The interesting thing here, and it is alluded to in the CBC article, is that demand for milk used to be considered inelastic. Milk was a staple - everyone got it delivered to their door on a daily basis and changes in price or income would have very minor impacts on demand. However, an increasing percentage of dairy is being consumed as ice cream and cheese and other value-added products. Demand for these is probably more elastic - as prices rise or incomes drop, people are likely to omit these items from their grocery list. As such, with the recession, it is not surprising that farmers are feeling the pinch and that subsidies are on the rise.

Filed under // food

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September 4, 2009 12:20 AM

vital stats

Leave it to Twitter to raise some interesting questions to ponder. One that came up in my stream recently:

Would you be dead or alive if there was no western medicine during your lifetime?

via @finitor via @iangogame

Having given it quite a bit of thought, I don't know. Before the age at which I can recall events vividly, I had an asthma attack that resulted in being taken to the hospital and given a mask with some meds (I only remember the mask because I got to take it home and we played doctor with it for years after). It was the one and only asthma incident in my life and I'm not sure if I would've died without modern medicine, but it seems to be the closest I ever came.

Actually, the closest I probably ever came to dying was caused by modern medicine. I inherited a lazy eye such that I had double vision until it was surgically corrected when I was five. During the surgery, my heart started beating irregularly and may have stopped for a brief period. After diagnostic testing post-surgery, the conclusion was that I had an adverse reaction to the anesthetic. While modern medicine allows me to see straight most of the time (when I'm really tired, my left eye has a tendency to drift off center to this day - sexy, I know), it also threatened my very existence.

The question also got me thinking about something I've pondered a bit in the past: how has modern medicine impacted gene frequencies within the population? I started contemplating this when a friend of mine was speculating on the reasons for the increased prevalence of allergies amongst children.

source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db10.pdf

I've heard the hypotheses about the links between immunizations, cleanliness, etc. and allergies, but I've yet to be convinced and I'm sticking to my theory: more and more people with potentially fatal food allergies are surviving to reproduce (due to modern medicine) and, as a result, the prevalence of food allergies is increasing. My theory is that modern medicine is to some extent responsible for the rise in allergies. Modern medicine has essentially transformed traits that once greatly compromised a person's fitness into traits that are almost inconsequential from a Darwinian perspective.

Back in the day, if you were unknowingly allergic to peanuts as a child and ate a peanut you'd probably go into anaphylactic shock and die, such that the genes that contributed to the allergy would not propagate. Today, children with severe peanut allergies are more likely to survive allergic reactions (due to advances in modern medicine), learn to avoid peanuts, and live to reproduce. And, the gene(s) responsible for the allergy are more likely to be passed on to the next generation. And so on, with the frequency of the gene(s) and the number of people with the allergy increasing with every subsequent generation.

Just some more food for thought.

Filed under // food science & technology

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August 13, 2009 8:16 PM

fruits of my labour

Click here to download:

fruits_of_my_labour.zip (2221 KB)

Filed under // food

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July 12, 2009 12:30 PM

you don't know what you've got till it's gone

I've added something new to my morning routine - shower, eat breakfast, check email, brush teeth, pollinate, get dressed, do hair, do makeup. If you guessed that pollinate was the recent addition, you're right.

When growing fruit, tomatoes in my case, indoors the absence of bees and other pollinators is an issue. Without spreading the pollen from one flower to another, tomatoes will not grow. The pollination process is not very complicated - I basically poke my finger in all the flowers that are open, starting and ending with the same flower. Seems to do the trick, as tomatoes are developing on my plants.

Having to take time to pollinate, water, and fertilize my indoor garden simply because it is indoors and isolated from the natural environment really exemplifies the extent of the natural processes that we traditionally depend on in the production of food. For the most part, humanity has supplemented or replaced many ecosystem services, such as fertilization and irrigation, by relying on technological innovation and finite resources (such as fossil water and fossil fuels) in order to increase yield. But pollination is one ecosystem service we haven't yet replaced and that we rely on tremendously. To think that our current food supply depends intrinsically on the activity of insects, largely bees, and other pollinators is humbling.

Humans are at the top of the food chain, but we rely extensively on the links in the chain that extend right to the bottom. Pollination is a prime example.

In contemplating the importance of bees, a verse from a well-known Joni Mitchell song entered my thoughts:

Hey farmer farmer

Put away that DDT now

Give me spots on my apples

But leave me the birds and the bees

Please!

Dont it always seem to go

That you dont know what youve got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

Combined with the recent discovery that bees are on the decline for reasons yet to be fully understood, reading the lyrics to the song left me feeling ... nostalgic. Nostalgic in the sense of "a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past." Partly because this is a song from my childhood and reminds me of hot summer afternoons on the porch with family and partly because I find myself mourning the loss of the bees in nature (the latter being a feeling in direct conflict with my phobia of bees and other insects with stingers) resulting from what is referred to as colony collapse disorder.

If human activity is causing the decline of the bees, I hope that we, as a society, have the common sense to rectify the situation. Loosing the bees seems like a case of not really knowing what we've got till it's gone. Pollinating ten tomatoes plants manually is one thing - pollinating all crops without help from bees is quite another.

Filed under // family & friends food science & technology sustainability

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June 20, 2009 1:45 PM

seedling (?) status IV

At what point are seedlings no longer seedlings? Somehow, I think that
my tomatoes and basil are now full-fledged plants. They have matured
past the seedling stage. To think that these plants emerged from tiny
seeds about a month ago and that some of them are already flowering
amazes me. Nature is phenomenal.

Click here to download:

seedling_status_IV.zip (1891 KB)

Filed under // food sustainability

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June 15, 2009 8:29 AM

rural weekend

I spent most of the weekend with John and Elaine at their place in rural Quebec. The weekend was filled with good food (much of it fresh from the garden), good conversation, and good company. Needless to say, it was a good weekend.