In space, no one can hear you retch

Soylent Green: the Malthusian Catastrophe at its finest.

Ever notice how disgusting the food of the future looks? Food that comes in pill form. Soylent green. Food that comes out of a replicator. It's pure nutrition. Efficient fuel. And food love is apparently an antiquated notion to our descendants. With the exception of Captain Picard's cuppa Earl Grey, there's little to no enjoyment involved in sci-fi cuisine.

The supposedly non-fiction news is no better. Consider vat meat. Bland packaged foods that won't wreck the space craft. Overfished oceans depleted of sea life. Molecular gastronomy advances that produce edible paper menus. Genetically engineered hybrid crops developed, owned and distributed by transglobalmegacorps.

And I guess I'm part of the problem, too, having taken part in a low-budget sci-fi spaghetti western that does nothing but subliminally re-enforce the assumptions that the food of the future is, at its very best, bland, packaged and the color of metal. (In Planetfall, the bar drinks are green and the food either arrives in mylar packets or in the form of shiny silver "space potatoes.")

Like it or not, I'd wager that culturally internalized visions like those revealed in sci-fi and fantasy fiction may, in some way, work to shape our collective futures. It's certainly possible that prescient sci-fi writers like H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Philip K. Dick only tapped into the trends of their respective times, extrapolating possibilities that happened to crystallize. But isn't it also possible that in the same way individuals use visualization or mantras and organizations use mission statements, a society unconsciously feeds off its collective dreams (films, graphic novels, books, tv shows, etc.) while inventing its future?

I'm not trying to suggest that sci-fi as a genre needs to take up the gauntlet (or pot holder, as the case may be) and lead the media in creating brave new visions for the luscious, fresh, juicy, robust meals of a much tastier future.

And it doesn't need to be writers and filmmakers that invent our culture's dreams for a delicious, sustainable future (and just as a side note, when I say "sustainability," I don't just mean responsible fishing or integrated land management. I'm thinking of the way delicious food is sustainable food. It sustains you physically, mentally and emotionally. Thus, a sustainable diet encompasses meals you want to eat again and again.).

I realize that storytelling is about conflict and drama, not food porn, but wouldn't it be wonderful to see some of the meals of the future depicted in the lush brushstrokes we currently seem to save for our visions of the past? Or are we already too sad and cynical to believe that the citizens of 2050 or 3075 or 3000 would ever sniff and savor and salivate over their suppers?

A year of food, G-Cal style

It's 46°F in New York City, and I just watched a guy walk down the street in a tank top and running shorts. Nevertheless, I'm feeling some holiday spirit. (Of course, that might just be the whiskey in my eggnog.)

As my gift to all y'all, I've compiled the US Food Holidays list in an ever-available, easy-to-install Google Calendar format.

Now you'll know the appropriate day to celebrate pigs in a blanket (inexplicably, it's April 24) and the proper night to sneak zucchini onto your neighbor's porch (August 8, naturally). Together we can all puzzle over the meaning of Cheese Sacrifice Purchase Day or Ice Cream and Violins Day.

A few caveats: This won't work with non-Google calendars. I've not included the national food months (too cumbersome), and I really have no way to verify the dates, so if you have quibbles about whether Lemon Cupcake Day is really on December 15 or not, I'm not sure we can really resolve the issue with complete accuracy. Therefore, take these with the proverbial grain of salt. They're just for fun.

Ready to install? Click the cute little button below, or search for "US food holidays" in your Google Calendar.

Introducing Mama 2.0

Mark, ever-watchful for weird cultural phenomena, writes from his west-coast post this note, entitled, "But where's the Iron Chef head-to-head feature?"

I just ran across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_Mama

For those who can't satisfy their cucumber-slicing jones
on a touch-screen, there's apparently a version coming
at Christmas for the new Nintendo Wii console, with its
fancy motion-sensing controller.

So then, Cooking Mama is either really sad (if you're like me and believe that everyone should have a real, live person who's willing to teach them basic life skills) or great news (if you see technology as a panacea for our cultural afflictions).

I envision a whole series... Personal Hygiene Mama. Basic Etiquette Mama. Don't Dress Like a Ho Mama.

It's clearly the necessary first step in acclimating us to happily accept our robot overlords.

Wookin' pa nub... and recipes

I know what you're looking for.

Thanks to the wonders of the web age (such as site statistics), I can now confirm all kinds of suspicions that would have been simple conjecture back the early days of blogging.

I know, for example, how many of you are reading this piece right now. (Not many, since I know that most of you don't really read blogs like this on the weekends.) I know that a lot of you sneak peeks during the workday. I know that a whole heaping bunch of you use Google to do your searching and you're checking out the web on a Windows machine with Internet Explorer.

I know how you got here, and according to my the data provided by hosting client, I get the tiniest inkling of what was through your head right before you got here.

Turns out, you folks are very interested in food. And sex. Very id, yes? (Also very predictable. This is the internet, after all, and it may have been created for military use and research, but it belongs to everyone now, and deep down, people are pretty attached to their vices.)

Here's a few recent searches:

how to make black walnut hull tincture (Good question. Anyone know this one?)

pierre herme chocolates in paris (Clearly a web user with good taste and deep pockets.)

patel brothers in nyc (Here's Patel's in Minneapolis and Patel Brothers in Queens.)

mahnomin porridge recipe (I wish I knew. I'll do some research and post the results.)

bad things that christopher columbus did (You should probably check the Wikipedia entry.)

organic hot chocolate reviews (Try Dagoba)

n.y. style spiedie marinade recipe (Links to recipes plus sandwich history here.)

cooking huitlacoche rice recipe (I don't have one. But you can find one here.)

wasted drunk (Sorry. I got nothin' for ya.)

apocalypse kit (No foodie should let an apocalypse start before they buy these things.)

aphrodisiac ingredient list (Check with this book.)

tomato haiku (Simple. Efficient. Elegant. Tomato Haiku is my medium of choice.)

tomato and watermelon salad (Far tastier than you'd guess.)

holy shit a talking muffin (Yay! My favorite muffin joke!)

And, quite surprisingly, these are the most popular searches of all...

miss ginsu (Aw, thanks!)

what is kritamo (A valid question. A valid answer here.)

marshmallowy treats (Maybe marshmallowy Peeps?)

how to make wild lard and recipes (This was a strangely popular search for Canadians. A terrific lard tutorial [how often do you get to say that?] can be found on An Obsession with Food)

bona calda recipe (Find both garlic love and bona calda info here.)

You guys like strange things. And it seems like you enjoy learning. Bully for you. I'm all for that.

With all this in mind, you can be sure I'll continue peeking into the dimly lit corners of the world, unearthing more recipes, tutorials and sources for strange and wonderful foods. You're on your own for the sex and drinkin'.

Point & click for orchard, field and meadow

This was on the NPR Marketplace Morning Report:

Local Foods Plymouth... like FreshDirect for the farmers' market.

The website is supremely limited, but the report made it sound like it’s been really popular there. People said they liked picking up all their farmers' market produce in one place.

I like the way they handle expectations on the first page (you can only order on Tuesdays) and they inform you that if you don’t pick up by 6 p.m. on delivery day, your food gets donated to a local charity.

Like City Farms & Community Supported Agriculture, online farmers' markets could offer yet another option for busy urbanites to connect to the bounty of the fields... and it gives small farmers a way to manage inventory and prevent waste.

I’m sure we’ll see more of this to come as the various pockets of our culture become more web-savvy.

Film v. Digital... the tradeoff for convenience

I take a lot of photos, and as anyone who eats with me can attest, 80 percent of those photos are food shots done with my stealthy little Canon PowerShot SD400 Digital Elph.

I love it because it's about as small and heavy as a deck of cards, which makes it fantastic for quick little things like this:


Lunch at Iposa in Barcelona.

(BTW: The salmon was fair, the pork was very nice and the lunch menu price was simply super: 6 EU for an entrée, beverage and coffee. Plus, it's around the corner from the Boqueria. I score it at two spoons out of five.)

While packing for Spain I glanced at my trusty (but dusty) old Pentax camera. It's a lovely SLR film version (the PZ-20, to be precise), and I wondered if my digital mania came at the cost of some image beauty. Should I even keep the old gray mare? I hadn't touched the poor thing in years... So to perform a test, I made the trek to B&H (which really is worth it just to see all the wonder that is B&H) for a new battery and some fresh rolls of Fuji film (my fave).

I took both along to Spain and used the digi for stealthy restaurant shots and the SLR for obviously touristy stuff. I just got back my 1-hour film developing, and you can see the head-to-head results here:



These are both images taken at Gaudi's fabulous (and as-of-yet unfinished) Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. The one on the left is film, the one on the right is digital. Click into each of them to get the larger versions.

Now, aside from a size difference and a difference in overall hue, look at the detail in the film version. The digital blows out in the lightest areas and doesn't pick up the delicate shapes of the shadows. Comparatively, the film version has such crisp lines and such touchable depth, it makes the digital version look flat and dull. The film version makes my stomach jump with its color and beautiful light handling. The digital one is merely... okay.

Of course I knew film was superior, but still: wow. I'm a bit shocked at the difference. I know all the digital benefits, of course... less fuss, less expense, fewer nasty chemicals in the processing, less looking like an idiot tourist or even worse, a theft target.



And yet, I also wonder how less tasty my food photos look. How much more lush tomato goodness would we see in this photo? How many moments are now captured as pale, digital index cards rather than vivid, tantalizingly rendered images?