Omnivore Atlanta

The worst thing about late summer is the lack of good apples. But the harvest is underway and I’m looking forward to my daily consumption of Fuji apples. I still prefer the Fuji over the Honeycrisp, which has acquired a huge following in the last couple of years.

Now, there’s a new apple — the SweeTango — which is a cross between a Honeycrisp and a Zestar (never heard of it). It’s not available in our area this year, but should be next. It’s been in development 10 years. Maybe they’ll change the name by the time it reaches us.

You can learn all about it on SweeTango’s own website, where you’ll also find this video:

(Hat tip to Michael Erickson of Fifth Group Restaurants)

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OK, so now maybe I’ve seen everything. People bring their dogs to Starbucks at Ansley Mall constantly, but today is the first time I’ve seen anyone bring a baby miniature horse.  Actually, there were two of them, both on pink leashes brought by two men wearing cowboy hats.

Note that the horse above sports pink hooves. It being Ansley Mall, I thought it was politically correct to ask if this were a male or female horse. The owner looked at me blankly and finally said, “Duh, get a clue.”

“Is that some kind of special paint for horse hooves?” I asked.

“No, it’s just ordinary nail polish,” he said.

“OK. Well, do they have like a litter box that they share?” I asked.

“They stay in the back yard,” the owner replied.

“Ask him if they curl the eyelashes,” a shy friend whispered to me. The horse did indeed have amazingly long lashes, but I declined asking further questions, since the owner seemed annoyed.

Anyway, I think I want one.

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Happy Labor Day, something of an anachronism, considering how little influence organized labor has in our society today (although union membership has been increasing slightly, but mainly among government workers, in the last few years).  Still, it’s worth remembering that Social Security, the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week were all in large part the result of union organizing. And organized labor has been advocating national health care for decades.

Appropriately, Slow Food USA has organized “eat-ins” all over the US, including Atlanta, today in order to call attention to the forthcoming debate over the Child Nutrition Act, which is up for renewal. It may be too late for you to get to an eat-in, but it’s not to late to get involved in other ways.  Slow Food has created a “Time for Lunch Platform” that outlines changes that would significantly improve the Child Nutrition Act and school lunches.

Children remain the most oppressed members of our society. They have very few autonomous rights and the child welfare system generally fails to protect them. They eat what they’re given to eat. Poor childhood nutrition plays a significant role in developing unhealthy lifetime eating habits. It’s no coincidence that the obesity rate is skyrocketing in a country that puts vending machines full of crap in its school lunchrooms.  Some years ago, the French — alarmed by their children’s consumption of fast food — initiated mandatory classes in developing taste.  (I’m not sure of the status of these classes today.)  I don’t think we’ll see that occurring here.

The summer before my senior year in high school, I was a volunteer in Atlanta’s first Head Start program. I was assigned to a public school downtown on English Avenue. Arguably the Great Society’s most successful program, Head Start endeavored to help kids from poor families get ready for their first year of school. And part of that was a good breakfast and lunch. (more…)

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FOR THE LOVE OF IT: Laura Nolan gave up the rat race to tend bar at Euclid Avenue Yacht Club.

Wearing a black V-neck and sterling silver earrings, Sarah Whistine sits near the pool tables at Georgia State hangout Sidebar, talking on her cell phone between shifts. She’s been working here for almost a year now, and at first glance seems like any other student working her way through college at a sports bar. But Whistine is not a college student. She has a degree as a physical therapist assistant from Black Hawk College in Illinois, and turned 30 last month.

The national percentage of jobless bachelor’s degree holders has doubled from 2.4 percent to 4.7 percent over the past year, according to educational attainment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But because Atlanta holds more opportunity than some other areas in the state, laid-off locals from this educational group often take service industry jobs while they continue to hope for a position in their field, said Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Steve Rondone, who works in Atlanta.

Continue reading “Feature: Higher hospitality”

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The New York Times asks:

Are online user reviews better when they are written in the heat of the moment or after the writer has returned to the home computer and had some time to cool off? That is the question facing review sites like Yelp and Citysearch when they build mobile applications.

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The Times-Georgian in Carroll County features an interesting story about a local goat farm that can’t keep up with the demand for its cheese.

[Co-owner Mark Stevens] sells to some exclusive restaurants in Atlanta, including Canoe, WaterHaven Restaurant and Star Provisions of Bacchanalia. Miller’s on the Square in Carrollton sells the cheese in an exclusive agreement with the dairy.

The goat farm sells out of cheese every day and is doing so well the partners plan to expand their operation this spring. They will double the size of the cheese kitchen and add a second pasteurizer. At that point they will be producing about 200 pounds of cheese a day….

[Stevens has] shown goats on the national circuit since he was 10, and has learned to recognize the characteristics of a good producer. [Partner Daniel] Young, a licensed judge with the American Dairy Goat Association, is also well versed in how to pick a good goat. Their combined knowledge has led to a herd of about 100 outstanding goats, some born as far away as Washington state. And good goats are what make a good goat cheese.

“What makes our cheese so good is our goats are so well taken care of,” Stevens said. “The happiness of our animals, that’s our number one goal. It is so true what the commercial says – happy cows make good milk, happy goats make good cheese.”

Weirdly, the article does not mention the brand name of the cheese or the name of the farm.

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The Utne Reader’s website features an article about two chefs who have opened sustainable sushi bars. The article summarizes the five most endangered fish:

Take salmon, number one in U.S. popularity. Wild fish are pricier than farmed, and aquacultured salmon are voracious feeders, crowded like factory hogs in filthy ocean farms. Ditto hamachi, also known as amberjack. Most wild shrimp are bottom-trawled, a practice as devastating as slash-and-burn, while farming shrimp often entails ecological destruction. Unagi, freshwater eel, are snatched and penned young before they can breed, then fattened on wild fish. And the numbers of bluefin tuna, which is nearly always wild caught, are crashing about as precipitously as stock prices.

A bigger problem with the five—dubbed the toxic five—is that they also tend to be a sushi bar’s biggest profit makers. Meaning that, even if a chef wanted to do the right thing and banish them, the economics of the sushi bar are skewed in favor of keeping them in the case.

It’s pretty amazing how much sushi Americans are eating:

In 2007 Americans picked up chopsticks and dipped 2.5 million sushi meals into slurries of wasabi and soy sauce. It’s a figure capped with a question mark: Is sushi as we know it—from prepacked supermarket rolls to exquisite omakase meals—doomed, inevitably, to extinction?

Consider the face of most American sushi: It is the realm of monster maki: hefty, gooey with spicy mayo, often deep-fried, and lavished with layer upon layer of fish. Like meat lover’s pizza and the Croissan’wich, monster maki were born in the USA, for people with a seemingly bottomless craving for proteins and no fear of calories. Not to mention an apparent lack of curiosity about where the rolls’ hefty layers of seafood originate.

“We’ve somehow moved ourselves into this strange relationship with food,” says Sheila Bowman, manager of outreach for Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “Look at how Americans eat shrimp. Forty years ago, you most likely ate five shrimp a year, probably in a shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve. Now we just gorge on them whenever we want. Some things simply should not be all you can eat, and fish is one of them.”

The article was written by John Birdsall and was excerpted from Edible San Francisco.

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Then you’re one application away from a burrito. Check out Chipotle’s latest marketing gimmick.

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Simon Owens is a  journalist and new media consultant who writes a blog called Bloggasm. He e-mailed today to alert me to his interview with Steven Mikulencak and Mark Rosenthal, who started the 27,000-member Facebook group calling for a boycott of Whole Foods.

Rosenthal explains his motivation to Owens:

[The op-ed] lit a fire under me,” Rosenthal said. “This person was using his company as a sort of Trojan horse for a bunch of discredited, bad ideas that we have said no to over and over again. And it was just really frustrating because we had an election where we voted on these things, and we said no to these stupid ideas about deregulation being the solution to any of our problems. We’ve said no to the notion that ‘I’ve got mine and everyone else can go suck an egg.’

The post is well worth a read. It mainly focuses on how so-called social media have become a highly effective means of community organizing.

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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who grew up on a family farm, writes about the way factory farming drains our food of soul:

[The] diverse, chaotic family farm is now disappearing, replaced by insipid food assembly lines.

The result is food that also lacks soul — but may contain pathogens. In the last two months, there have been two major recalls of ground beef because of possible contamination with drug-resistant salmonella. When factory farms routinely fill animals with antibiotics, the result is superbugs that resist antibiotics.

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A few weeks ago, my wife decided after careful research, and I believe (in all honesty) after watching an episode of “Oprah,” that she would embark on a lifestyle challenge: going completely vegan, no gluten, no processed sugar, no alcohol, and no caffeine for 21 days.

At first, I didn’t think I would participate. Jazmin got started on July 1, along with her cousin Nicole who’s interning with us. I decided as a show of support to follow along loosely. And I’d help cook at home, or guide their efforts in the kitchen. But my competitiveness came to the surface and I had to see if I could do it.

It may be important at this point to remind you that I’m a chef. Currently running a hamburger restaurant. Frying potatoes in a mixture of duck fat and lard. Pureeing Krispy Kreme doughnuts into milkshakes. You’re more apt to find me at a local coffee house than my own kitchen. And I do a ton of consulting for beverage and liquor companies.

This lifestyle challenge would be difficult if I were an accountant. But in my line of work, it seemed impossible. (more…)

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock without a laptop, you already know that Whole Foods has been targeted for boycott. The reason is an op-ed column that the store’s CEO and co-founder, John Mackey, wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week.

The op-ed, which begins with an anti-socialist quote from Margaret Thatcher, is a reiteration of the usual tired talking points against making health care an entitlement — the way it already is for the elderly and veterans.

Whole Foods is, of course, a store whose primary appeal is to progressives interested in sustainable agriculture and community support — precisely the same people who mainly support guaranteed health care for all Americans. So, apart from the fact that it’s surprising Mackey turns out to be so conservative (”libertarian”), it’s also shocking, from a practical perspective, that he would pen something so predictably offensive to his customers. What was he thinking?

The pure stupidity of this is all the more offensive because the column includes an advertisement:

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

Translation: Shop at Whole Foods and you won’t need health care.

You can read about the boycott effort on a Facebook page that already has more than 10,000 supporters. It includes links to some point-by-point refutations of Mackey’s argument. You can also check out Whole Foods’ own forum on the topic.

It goes without saying that Mackey has every right to express his opinion. The rest of us likewise now have a good excuse to move to Trader Joe’s or Publix and Kroger. As I’ve written many times before, I have long found Whole Foods’ produce vastly overrated, especially for the inflated costs. There’s nothing that the store supplies that can’t, with some extra effort, be bought elsewhere.

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How come we don’t have a goth restaurant like this in Atlanta? Who wouldn’t want to eat here after seeing their ad?

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A reader who is blessed (or cursed) with a son who is ever in search of the strange and exotic to eat has written me in hopes of finding a restaurant that serves “Rocky Mountain Oysters.”

I don’t recall ever seeing this dish of deep-fried bull (or lamb or bison) testicles on an Atlanta menu. However, now that offal is popular at restaurants like Abattoir and Holeman & Finch, it seems like the right time to begin serving them.

If anyone has a lead, please post a comment. The reader has $100 riding on a bet that her son won’t be able to eat them. Today, Thursday, is his birthday and she’d like to put him to the test tonight.

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David Aferiat is an Atlantan and semi-finalist for the second season of the PBS reality series, “The Winemakers.” The first season debuts next month.  Check out Aferiat’s blog and watch his video below.

Can Atlanta produce another national wine star like Hardy “Dirty South” Wallace?

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We saw the film Julie & Julia over the weekend and a day later, craving French food, hurried to Atmosphere to satiate ourselves. I was surprised to learn that Hopeton Hibbert, most recently chef at Eclipse di Luna, is chef here now.

Our server told us that we were far from alone in rushing there after seeing the film. Business is booming because of it.

My (delicious) entree was this rack of lamb with polenta, green beans and roasted tomatoes and eggplant.

Wayne ordered Coquille St. Jacques with ravioli.

Dessert was three profiteroles stuffed with vanilla ice cream and drizzled with chocolate.

More in Grazing later this week.

(Photos by Cliff Bostock)

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Personally, I prefer brownies.

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“How can you be a fat-positive feminist who’s trying to lose weight?”

Greta Christina answers her own question. I found this part of her essay interesting:

It has helped for me to think of this as a political issue. It helps to remember that the multinational food corporations have spent decades carefully studying the above-mentioned evolutionary food triggers so they can manipulate me into buying and eating way more food than is good for me.

It has helped to think of weight loss not as giving in to the mainstream cultural standards of female beauty but as sending a big “Fuck You” to the purveyors of quadruple-patty hamburgers and Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick.

It has helped for me to remember that my other “natural” impulses aren’t so natural, either. It’s worked for me to remember that as a nonmonogamist, I have to think carefully about who to have sex with and when; that as a city-dweller, I have to think consciously about whether I’m genuinely in danger or am just being paranoid (or conversely, whether I’m genuinely safe or am just being oblivious).

Food is no different. It’s “natural” for humans to be rational animals and to think about our choices instead of just reacting.

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Adventurous Tastes says it’s Stephen Sharpe of French American Brasserie. You can check him out and get sloshed enough to hit on him at a celebration tomorrow night:

To celebrate Chef Sharpe’s big win, Adventurous Tastes and FAB are throwing a party on FAB’s  roof deck on Wednesday, August 5, starting at 7 p.m. Come enjoy complimentary FAB appetizers and a cash bar serving your favorite adult beverages, plus the signature drink of the night – a Bacardi Dragon Berry Lemonade. Come check out Chef Sharp for yourself and see what all the fuss is about!

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Well, I couldn’t find a clip of Sophia Loren folding her pizza in “Houseboat.” But I did come across this bit of nostalgia from 1984’s “Supergirl,” a horrible movie, despite Helen Slater’s super power to mesmerize evil with her beauty. This does provide proof, as I’ve long argued, that Popeyes chicken is the dinner of champions.

Actually, it looks like Popeyes really could use a superhero. A 19-year-old manager was recently murdered in Houston. A Wichita Popeyes was robbed, as was one in Beaumont, Tx.

(Photo courtesy of CapedWonder.com)

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Jeff Varasano was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” Sunday. You can hear the piece on the NPR website.

Meanwhile, a couple commenters on my recent post about tweeting for free cake at Varasano’s are griping about a new card on the tables there. They instruct diners to fold their pizza slices for maximum deliciousness. I reminded them that Sophia Loren gave the same advice in the film Houseboat. I’ve looked everywhere for a clip of that scene but haven’t found one yet.

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Wow, lobster’s now cheaper per pound than scrap meat:

Looking for an inexpensive change-up for your next backyard barbeque? Try lobster. “Per pound, it’s less expensive than hot dogs right now,” grumbles lobster-boat captain Mike Dassatt, who fishes the coast near Belfast, Maine, with his wife Sheila….

All around the globe, the lousy economy is having a devastating impact on demand for luxury goods, and the Maine lobster may well be the Mercedes-Benz of food.

Restaurant demand for lobster is down 30% to 35%, versus 10% to 15% for other seafood, reports Michael Tourkistas, CEO of Lynn, Mass., seafood distributor East Coast Seafoods. “Lobster is considered a celebration food — a feel-good food — and right now people don’t have a lot to celebrate,” says Tourkistas.

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Salon has published a fascinating interview with Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, argues that the signal event in the evolution of apes into men was learning to use fire to cook — not the development of tools, as is usually said.

Wrangham observes that cooked food is more efficiently digestible and nutritious than raw food (and he thus criticizes the so-called “raw food movement”). He also argues that cooking shaped our households and notions about gender.

It’s a great read, but I was surprised that neither the author of the interview or Wrangham himself credited Claude Lévi-Strauss for his seminal book, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), which argues (by looking at mythological themes) that the axis of the raw and the cooked signifies the binary opposition of nature and culture. It’s arguably a rather small step from Lévi-Strauss’ argument to Wrangham’s.

Maybe Wrangham takes up Lévi-Strauss in the book’s text….

Economy got you down? Home in foreclosure? Don’t worry. Bake cakes….

Atlanta did not make Huffington Post’s list of the 10 Best US Cities for Local Food. But you can still nominate us….

Hollywood organizes to help save the sushi favorite, bluefin tuna, from extinction.

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Your favorite summer pizza: Stella reprises its fig and proscuitto pie tonight. …

The futility of existence: Man cracks the KFC code. …

The Thoughtful Bread Company: Merry olde England gets its first sustainable bakery. …

Are you a lousy writer? Maybe you need to drink more. …

An alternative to heavy drinking: Morelli’s is serving two new (to me) ice cream flavors, champagne-peach and Grand Marnier-pineapple.

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Hurrah for marketing.

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