Amuse Bouche

Painting by Dennis Wojtkiewicz

• This is sad. Café culture is one of the great achievements of European civilization. But in the collapsing European economies, people are cutting back on coffee. Without café culture would there be a Sartre, Beauvoir, European democracy?
• Wine is everywhere. England, Japan, and Thailand are among the countries trying to make wine. Great. More wine regions whose names I can mispronounce.
• If you’re tired of cookbooks, twitter, celebrity food shows, and blogs you can now get recipes via comic strips. Here’s a recipe for thrice-cooked bacon delivered by half-baked nit wits.
• Some food regulations apparently work. Since FDA regulations began requiring food packaging to list trans fats, the presence of elevated cholesterol in kids has dropped 28%.
• Speaking of food labeling, there has been much discussion about listing ingredients on wine labels. Here is a good discussion of the issue with insightful comments. My sense is that only wine geeks, like me, and perhaps vegans or vegetarians care about what is in the wine. It is probably not worth the effort.
• Deskilling is the modern way. It used to be cooking was about using every available part of an animal. Today we throw away 40% of our food. Is this progress?
• This is ridiculous. At the recent wine bloggers conference, various wineries hosted a speed wine tasting. Each winery gets 5 minutes to show their stuff!You cannot evaluate a wine, listen to a pitch, and write notes in the space of a few seconds. What is the point? Wine bloggers should know better.
• Chef Marcus Samuelsson thinks that in order to solve the obesity crisi, we should get rid of the distinction between healthy foods and tasty foods; chefs should make only tasty foods that are healthy.  Let’s not go there. I’m all in favor of chefs developing healthy foods and exposing kids to them. But there are many things worth eating that are just not healthy. In moderation, there is nothing wrong with eating them. It’s always a bad idea to have a policy that is essentially deceptive. It is simply a lie that there is no distinction between what is healthy and what tastes good.