The good things about food, safely prepared, from my kitchen.
Whole beef eye fillet for two, from the extra-super clearance cheap meat section of the supermarket, with an olive oil-mustard-garlic-lime-rosemary crust, pan-seared, then slow roasted in the oven to 130F and served with a red wine beef jus, with roasted potatoes, mushrooms, leeks and asparagus, whole wheat bread (they call it whole meal here), and Saucer scallops from the waters off the Queensland coast.
As the usual suspects weigh in with ol’ timey public relations strategies and superficial observations of social media in the , it’s good to poke fun at all things foodie. Satirical takedowns of the pretentious and pompous never go out of style, regardless of the medium.
From Eater, a cautionary tale for this modern life: the below anthem from The Key of Awesome! warns against the perils of tweeting before eating. A send up of Pet Shop Boys songs, it features "culinary paparazzi," a lobster and a cupcake posing like super models, and an unhappy ending. For the next time you think, "it’s unthinkable to dine out and not record it/Want the world to know I can afford it."
I don’t like to be paranoid about germs when I go out to eat. I like to relax and I hope that the restaurant has enough pride to provide training and demand safe practices form their employees. I prefer to assume that public policy measures are keeping me safe to a point and my healthy immune system can be counted on in case of a slip up.
When dining upscale, paying a higher price for smaller, more chic portions, many may assume that good food handling practice comes along with meticulous placement of micro-greens. This could be the case, but the 
same pitfalls exist for any high volume kitchen, with workers who are susceptible to the same illnesses and temptations to cut corners in order to get through the night.
When I read through the New York Times’ Dining and Wine section, restaurants are frequently featured for their chef’s artistic take on comfort food or rising celebrity status. The slideshow photos showcase the restaurant’s unique décor, avant-garde fare, and often a basic health code violation. A pair of hospital-esque latex gloves probably subtracts from the photographers’ artistic visions of plated fancy foods. Maybe chefs just take off the gloves for the photo shoot or move the tongs.
While New York health code does not require gloves to be worn during food prep, it does prohibit bare hand contact with ready to eat foods. Proper glove use is one way to comply. Of course, there are many restaurant employees who will misuse the latex gloves, so thorough handwashing is essential.
The food porn chefs on TV know almost nothing about food safety; those seeking to avoid city licensing may know even less.
A reporter from the New York Times is the latest to discover and glorify San Francisco’s underground dining scene,
The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmers markets. Here, where the food rave — .jpeg)
call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become “members” (free) and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected.
Fueled by Twitter and food blogs, the market has spawned a host of underground imitators in places like Washington and Atlanta, where about 1,000 people showed up for the first of a series of monthly Saturday night craves — and where Tim Ho, a young Taiwanese-American who cooks part-time, boasted that his jellyfish salad has a crunch he compared to “tendons and ligaments.” There are outposts as far as London and Amsterdam.
Even mainstream farmers markets are creeping toward nighttime, including a Friday evening market in Nashville near the State Capitol where homeward-bound workers can drink wine as they chat about kale.
Some see the growth of the underground markets as part of a high renaissance of awareness for a Fast Food Nation generation, with its antipathy for the industrial food machine. In the recesses of the markets, a certain self-expressive, do-it-yourself “craftness” flourishes.
I just threw up a little.
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Last week, Stephen Colbert announced a recall of his fictional cookbook, "I Eat America (And So Can You!)" due to a production error beyond his control (right).
Apparently drawing on outbreaks of salmonella and campylobacter involving raw, frozen, breaded chicken thingies, Colbert said his recipe for Chicken 
Col-Don Bleu may actually need to be cooked.
He might as well be on the Food Network, what with it’s terrible food safety, is finally reaching the outer limits of food porn – ratings are going down.
Food Network and sister network HGTV — Scripps Networks’ two biggest money-makers — are seeing troubling signs that their core female fans are starting to look elsewhere for entertaining fare. After years of growth, both networks experienced their first major ratings falloff at the end of last year.
In the fourth quarter, Food Network, which helped launch the careers of celebrity chefs Sandra Lee and Rachael Ray, posted a 10.3 percent drop among viewers ages 25 to 54, considered a key category for advertisers.
Most troubling, primetime ratings for women — the primary audience for both channels — were down in December. Food Network ratings among women ages 18 to 49, and 25 to 54, fell 9 percent last month.
Part of the challenge for the food-focused channel is shifting tastes, with viewers going for edgier culinary "reality" competition shows.
I suggest a reality food safety show where the barfing and crapping and sometimes life-long gifts of foodborne illness are displayed in their glory. Would probably work on youtube.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Sign Off – I Eat America (And So Can You!) Recall | ||||
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With an appeal to the simplistic, Barbara Laino says, “We know processed foods are wrong for us. It has to be wrong for them. If you can feed yourself healthily and your children, then you can feed your pets healthily, too. It really isn’t that hard.”
Laino is talking about the standard recipe she uses to feed her Alaskan malamute, another dog and three cats in her house for around 10 days: grind 40 pounds of pasture-raised chicken necks with another 20 pounds of chicken giblets. To this, she adds five .jpg)
pounds of carrots, a whole cabbage and several other fruits, all from the organic fields of Midsummer Farm, Ms. Laino’s farm in Warwick, N.Y. Finally, she blends the mix with herbs and supplements.
She tells the New York Times in a piece of pet food porn that she wants for her pets what she wants for herself: a healthy diet of unprocessed organic foods. And now she teaches others.
Cesar Millan, host of the television show “The Dog Whisperer,” says, “The dog has always been a mirror of the human style of life. Organic has become a new fashion, a new style of living.”
Cesar got the lifestyle bit right, because that is all it is; as for microbiological safety, the cross-contamination risks alone in the food prep sound daunting.
Nancy K. Cook, the vice president at the Pet Food Institute, a trade association for commercial pet food makers, cautions pet owners that it is hard to create a balanced diet at home, since dogs and cats have specific nutritional requirements.
Joseph J. Wakshlag, a clinical nutritionist at the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University, said that if pets are not fed the correct balance of proteins, fats, 
minerals and vitamins, they can experience several health disorders, including anemia, broken bones and loss of teeth from lack of calcium.
Korinn Saker, a clinical nutritionist at the College of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University, who treats animals at the school’s teaching hospital, said she was not against people cooking for their pets, but that if it was not done correctly, the consequences could be harmful.
She has seen several dogs with adverse effects from unbalanced homemade pet food diets, including a German shepherd puppy “who was walking on its elbows because it had no strength in its bones,” she said. The dog, it turned out, was not getting enough calcium.
Dr. Saker, asked to analyze the recipe from Ms. Laino’s workshop, found that it was lacking in a number of nutrients recommended by the Association of American Feed Control Officials.
Ms. Laino said she rejects the standards recommended by the feed association, and .jpg)
suggested that her recipe might be richer in certain nutrients because the ingredients are organic.
Hucksterism is alive and well for Barbara Laino and the N.Y. Times.
Christmas Eve dinner in Manhattan with a couple of Kansas State modern languages graduate students from Senegal (they speak French there).
Oven-roasted French-cut lamb ribs – cooked to 140F but still needed a quick zap in the microwave to bring out the flavor — with roasted herb-garlic potatoes, Frenchy cheese, whole grain bread and salad.
Justin Rohrlich of Minyanville argues the food industry can learn a few things from the adult entertainment industry, which doesn’t wait for a massive outbreak of 
disease before taking corrective action.
Rather than wait for disaster to strike, then go about shredding documents and deleting emails as the investigators close in, "more than half a dozen pornographers in California’s multibillion-dollar adult entertainment industry have halted production after an actor tested positive for HIV — and more shutdowns were expected," according to the Associated Press.
"From Vivid’s perspective, there was no question that when we heard this, we immediately shut down production and said let’s get the facts and evaluate them before we move forward," Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid, one of the largest makers of adult films, said.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the popularity of cooking shows, the eat-local movement and the growth of casual-dining restaurants are reshaping consumers’ views of what makes food look appealing. Where making food look perfect was 
once a primary task of food stylists and photographers, the new challenge is making messy food look appetizing.
Alison Attenborough, a New York-based food stylist who specializes in editorial work for clients, says, "People are interested in small butchers, artisan producers, farmer’s markets—a more handmade look."
At a recent Food & Wine photo shoot, Ms. Attenborough was making recipes by celebrity chef Tyler Florence for the magazine’s October issue. She carefully assembled a cheeseburger so that the bacon and red onions would look like they were erupting from the bun. With a heat gun, she melted the cheese to make a corner of the slice dribble down. For a scallop appetizer, Ms. Attenborough intentionally left one fleck of parsley on the table, as if the cook had just finished applying the garnish and hadn’t bothered to clean up.
Whether for editorial or advertising purposes, the point of making natural food look appealing is to get people to buy the product, go out to eat or make a recipe.
Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, says the effectiveness of the natural trend lies in its ability to invite the viewer in. "It might enable us more to put ourselves in the picture," he says.
The Internet is good for porn and videos of David Hasslehoff; that’s what the local university radio station says.
There’s this website called The Caveman Diet, that had a post entitled, Can I start giving raw milk to my 7 month old infant?
And the best answer was deemed to be, “wait till he turns 1. It is ok to have raw milk only in cereal in the mornings. At 7 months old he is way too young."
From a microbiological perspective, this is stupid beyond belief. Maybe it works if you thought Baywatch was an accurate depiction of California beach life.