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food

3 Cooks in Prison Honed Creativity with Drab Ingredients–Now Out, Award-Winning Chef And Businessmen

in People 40 views

“There are geniuses in there,” said 2-time James Beard Award winner, Keith Corbin, referring to incarcerated men and their ability to cook with the most lifeless, flavorless ingredients imaginable.

Corbin spent 10 years in prison himself, and combined with his career as an award-winning chef at his restaurant Alta Adams, he knows what it takes to make good food out of anything.

Corbin was profiled in a feature piece at the Guardian that twisted together the stories of several entrepreneurs who launched careers in the food industry after more than a decade of smoking sausages in a toilet with toilet paper, or making tamal dough with ground-up Fritos.

Another of the featured ex-cons was Chef Michael Carter, executive at Down North Pizza in Philidelphia where he employs only formerly incarcerated men, or returning citizens as he called them, and offers them half-way or low-income housing with the apartment building located above his pizza shop.

His pies, mostly square ones, have made the New York Times best pizza list, and won the Best of Philly 2021 category for square pie.

After Carter was released from a 12-year sentence, he took a class for resume writing for food professionals and was asked what experience he had. He replied he had cooked in prison for 2,000—he got a job the next week.

“The mission is actually what made me accept the job,” Carter said, “to be able to have a voice and tell people about the plight in our community of returning citizens.”

It’s something that both Carter and Corbin reported to Sonya Singh at the Guardian—that prison squeezes men, and that squeeze sometimes creates diamonds.

“You have people in there that literally never went to school for technology, but the phone breaks and they’ll figure out how to fix the motherboard,” Corbin said. “There’s geniuses in there, ingenuity.”

Corbin, on the other hand, went into prison with a deep connection to food. His grandmother grew tomatoes and collard greens in their yard, and would wake up at 5 a.m. to start cooking for the working people in her community.

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Farmers Show off Mammoth Produce at County Fair Headlined by 1,300 lbs. Pumpkin

in Food 265 views

At last weekend’s Malvern Autumn Festival in the UK, growers from across the Isles showed off the truly frightening proportions that vegetables can grow to, headlined by massive pumpkins brought in on a forklift.

4th place winner Tim Saint transported his whopping 667 lbs. pumpkin in a trailer to display at the event held over the weekend in England’s Worcestershire.

Even though he needed a pallet, trailer, and industrial strapping to move the thing, his was a small fry compared to Curtis Leach’s 1st prize-winning pumpkin that arrived at weights usually reserved for cars.

At 638 kilograms, or 1,373 lbs, the gargantuan gourd was 40 kilograms more than the second-place entry, but half as heavy as the current Guinness World Record for heaviest pumpkin, which was 2,700 pounds.

“I grew a 667 lbs. pumpkin this year which I’m delighted at,” said Mr. Saint. “I’ve been growing pumpkins for 20 years and that’s the biggest I’ve ever done It’s got to be over 3ft tall at least, I’m 6ft tall myself and it’s big.”

“The secret is just plenty of water and manure, plenty of cow manure especially,” added Mr. Saint, who did take 1st prize for largest beetroot. “It takes a lot of water, I normally give it five watering cans of water a day.”

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Vacant Office Near D.C. Turns Into Indoor Farm–Using Empty Buildings to Grow Food

in Food 197 views

Arlington, Virginia is like a gateway to the city of Washington D.C. Part of the Metro line, but across the Potomac, it’s nevertheless a busy area and not the kind of place you’d expect to be able to get minutes-old, farm-fresh produce.

But Area 2 Farms is growing greens, herbs, and root vegetables in a vertical farm thanks to the dearth of traditional office tenants. With high-rise office space remaining vacant even after the end of the pandemic, landlords are open to ideas.

Jackie Potter and Tyler Baras pitched the idea of an indoor farm and it was obviously a good one because Area 2 is already well-established in the Arlington area such that they offer subscription delivery of fresh veggies to fellow urbanites starting at $40 per week.

Arlington, Virginia is like a gateway to the city of Washington D.C. Part of the Metro line, but across the Potomac, it’s nevertheless a busy area and not the kind of place you’d expect to be able to get minutes-old, farm-fresh produce.

But Area 2 Farms is growing greens, herbs, and root vegetables in a vertical farm thanks to the dearth of traditional office tenants. With high-rise office space remaining vacant even after the end of the pandemic, landlords are open to ideas.

Jackie Potter and Tyler Baras pitched the idea of an indoor farm and it was obviously a good one because Area 2 is already well-established in the Arlington area such that they offer subscription delivery of fresh veggies to fellow urbanites starting at $40 per week.

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Farmers Markets Thriving Since Pandemic as Shoppers and Venders Form Unbreakable Ritual

in Uncategorized 231 views

The number of farmers markets in the US is increasing—as are the numbers of customers and the number of states choosing to celebrate them with an official ‘Farmers Market Week’.

The cheeriest place to buy your groceries not only survived the pandemic, they are thriving—despite lockdown policies in many states labeling them as “non-essential”, forcing a shut-down, while indoor supermarkets were kept open.

Thirty years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 open farmers markets in the U.S. Today, there are more than 8,600 markets currently registered in the USDA Farmers Market Directory, per the Farmers Market Coalition.

This nonprofit advocacy organization fought on behalf of farmers during the pandemic, presenting a spirited defense using scientific and common sense arguments to keep them going when state or local governments wanted to shut them down.

In lockdown-heavy cities like Chicago, the Green City Market on Saturdays has grown from 5,000-10,000 shoppers pre-pandemic to 8,000-15,000 today.

Part of the reason, Green City Market’s organizer Taylor Choy tells the AP, is that supply chain issues which during COVID-19 increased the prices at supermarkets didn’t affect farmers markets that instead rely on local producers.

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Students win “canstruction” competition to help reduce food insecurity

in Food 110 views

The Northern New York Community Foundation’s LEAD Council has announced the winners of its first “Canstruction for Northern New York” contest to help reduce food insecurity across the north country.

The project is a group activity to encourage students to team up and construct a fun, themed structure made of donated canned food and other nonperishable food items or hygiene products to support a local food pantry or backpack program of their choice.

The three top teams combined to collect 1,665 canned food and other nonperishable food items or hygiene products that will help restock two school-based backpack programs and a community food pantry.

Additionally, the winning teams will share $1,750 in grant awards to present to three different local nonprofit organizations that participants selected.

With nearly 400 votes cast, Katie Blunden’s statistics class at General Brown High School, Dexter, won the People’s Choice Award for “The Giving Tree.” The class also won the Top Collection Award, with 914 nonperishable food items collected.

The Best Design Award went to the Stage Notes not-for-profit theater group in Watertown for its “canstruction” of “An Evening at the Theatre.”

Participating teams will donate all the items they used to build their sculptures to a local food pantry or backpack program. Each award winner will receive a $500 grant for participants to distribute to a nonprofit of their choice.

General Brown students designated the district’s backpack program to receive their collected items. Students also selected the backpack program as the recipient of two $500 grant awards they won for the People’s Choice Award and the Top Collection Award.

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Specific Gut Bacteria Extract More Energy Which Seems to be Associated with Obesity

in Health 143 views

Certain hyper-efficient microbe species in our guts could be the reason why some people gain weight and others don’t, proving once again how much influence the microbiota has in our lives.

Unfair as it is, some of us seem to put on weight just by looking at a pizza while others can munch away with abandon and not gain a gram. Part of the explanation could be related to the composition of our gut microbes.

Researchers studied the residual energy in the feces of 85 Danes to estimate how effective their gut microbes are at extracting energy from food. At the same time, they mapped the composition of gut microbes for each participant.

The results show that roughly 40% of the participants belong to a group that extracts more energy on average from food compared to the other 60%.

The researchers also observed that those who extracted the most energy from food also weighed 10% more on average, amounting to an extra 9 kilograms, or around 20 pounds.

“We may have found a key to understanding why some people gain more weight than others, even when they don’t eat more or any differently. But this needs to be investigated further,” says Associate Professor Henrik Roager of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, which ran the study.

The results indicate that being overweight might not only be related to how healthily one eats, the amount of exercise one gets, or their sleep quality. It may also have something to do with the composition of a person’s gut microbes.

Participants were divided into three groups, based on the composition of their gut microbes. The so-called B-type composition (dominated by Bacteroides bacteria) is more effective at extracting nutrients from food and was observed in 40% of the participants.

Following the study, the researchers suspect that a portion of the population may be disadvantaged by having gut bacteria that are a bit too effective at extracting energy.

This effectiveness may result in more calories being available for the human host from the same amount of food—an adaptation which would have been of great value to early man, but during the age of abundance could be leading to obesity.

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Holy Mackerel! Fish Really Is Brain Food – Even if You Only Eat a Small Amount

in Food/Health 153 views

Could eating salmon, cod, tuna, herring, or sardines keep your brain healthy and your thinking agile in middle age? This study says emphatically, YES.

Eating cold-water fish and other sources of omega-3 fatty acids may preserve brain health and enhance cognition in middle age, according to new evidence from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

In fact, healthy volunteers whose red blood cells contained higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids were found to have better brain structure and cognitive function than others who were aged 40-60.

Could eating salmon, cod, tuna, herring, or sardines keep your brain healthy and your thinking agile in middle age? This study says emphatically, YES.

Eating cold-water fish and other sources of omega-3 fatty acids may preserve brain health and enhance cognition in middle age, according to new evidence from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

In fact, healthy volunteers whose red blood cells contained higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids were found to have better brain structure and cognitive function than others who were aged 40-60.

Volunteers’ average age was 46. The team looked at the relation of red blood cell omega-3 fatty acid concentrations with MRI and cognitive markers of brain aging. Researchers also studied the effect of omega-3 red blood cell concentrations in volunteers who carried APOE4, a genetic variation linked to higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

The study of 2,183 dementia- and stroke-free participants found that higher omega-3 index was associated with larger hippocampal volumes. The hippocampus, a structure in the brain, plays a major role in learning and memory.

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This Group Has Rerouted 250 Million Pounds of Food From Landfills to Feed People in Need

in Charity/Food 193 views

A Los Angeles-based non-profit is helping reroute perishing produce to communities in need of more fresh fruits and veggies all over the country.

A combination of inflationary governmental fiscal policy and the centrally-planned response to COVID-19 has really damaged the ability of rural or food-desert-based communities to buy fresh produce.

Since 2009, Food Forward has rerouted 250 million pounds of food from landfills and delivered over a billion servings of fresh produce to food insecure communities.

Based in Southern California, Food Forward have mastered the logistical challenge of rerouting produce destined for landfills to communities that need it. SoCal is both the largest exporter and importer of produce in the country, making them perfectly placed.

From its refrigerated food distribution center in south east LA, the group works with 350 direct partners coordinating food donations, which have so far made it out to 12 California counties, six other states, and two Tribal nations.

“We understood workflows well enough, we understood efficiencies, we understood the network and how food flows through the L.A. area, the contiguous county, and the region,” CEO Rick Nahmias told Civileats.

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Snacking on Grapes May Add 4-5 Years to Lifespans of Those Who Regularly Eat Fast Food

in Food/Health 204 views

New research suggests that snacking on grapes might combat the effects of consuming a junk food diet—flushing out the refined fats and sugars of processed food.

Eating the grapes led to “unique gene expression patterns, reduced fatty liver, and extension of lifespan” for animals consuming the high-fat diet, said Dr. John Pezzuto who led the team at Western New England University.

Pezzuto, who has authored over 600 studies, called it “truly remarkable.”

“It adds an entirely new dimension to the old saying ‘you are what you eat.’”

In a series of experiments, mice gorged on a high fat diet, similar to those consumed in western countries.

They also received over a cup of daily powdered grape supplement. These lab rodents had less fatty liver—and lived longer than those who didn’t.

The effect was an alteration of gene expression. As shown in this paper, fatty liver—which affects around 25% of humans and can eventually lead to liver cancer—is prevented or delayed. The genes responsible for the development of fatty liver were altered in a beneficial way by feeding grapes.

In addition to genes related to fatty liver, the researchers found increased levels of antioxidant genes after the grape-supplemented diets.

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