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Rise of the anti-restaurant
Beppi Crosariol, Globe & Mail
It’s in a seedy alleyway, has no kitchen and never bothered to hire a chef. But Sean Heather’s meat, cheese and wine bar is anything but a misstep – instead, it’s turning the restaurant model on its ear
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VANCOUVER — Want to succeed in the restaurant business? Consider some tips from Sean Heather:
Find a rundown space in a seedy alleyway with no pedestrian traffic or other businesses; replace the existing wood flooring with bare concrete; set up a long, picnic-style, communal table and offer patrons paper napkins instead of linen. Oh, and don’t bother with unnecessary details like hiring a chef or installing a stove; buy ready-made food and slice it up onto plates.
Welcome to Salt Tasting Room, a 14-month-old charcuterie restaurant and wine bar in Vancouver’s Gastown that has not only played to positive reviews but also emerged as one of the most envied, and unlikely, successes in this city’s hyperactive fine-dining scene.
From a culinary standpoint, Salt taps the growing appetite for raw-milk cheeses and locally cured meats with farmhouse provenance. There’s ash-covered camembert from Moonstruck Organic Cheese Inc. on Salt Spring Island, for example, and wild-boar headcheese that Mr. Heather sourced from Oyama Sausage Co. on Granville Island.
(26 September 2007)
Factory farming cruel for animals and hard on the planet, too
Peter Fricker, Vancouver Sun
The Fraser Valley, once a bucolic landscape of small family farms, has become a casualty of one of the great global issues of the 21st century: The dirty, dangerous and inhumane business of intensive agriculture — a business driven by our insatiable demand for cheap meat.
Earlier this year, the B.C. Agriculture Council quietly released a study that found “high to very high environmental risk” levels of nitrates in the soil of a number of the Valley’s farms. Previous studies have identified agriculture as the main source of nitrates leaching into the Abbotsford aquifer, which supplies drinking water to 100,000 people.
Specifically, it’s the enormous amount of nitrate-rich livestock manure that’s the problem. Farmers spray masses of it on crops as fertilizer, causing excess nutrients such as nitrates, phosphates and potassium to seep into the soil and groundwater.
High levels of nitrates in drinking water are associated with blue baby syndrome, a condition that reduces babies’ ability to carry sufficient oxygen in the blood. Nitrates also cause excessive algae growth in waterways, suffocating aquatic life.
The manure is from 128,000 cattle, 95,500 pigs, 767,000 turkeys and, most importantly, the 15.4 million chickens in the Valley. The chickens alone produced 736,500 cubic yards of manure in 2000; this is expected to rise to one million cubic yards per year by 2010.
The huge amount of manure is the direct result of the intensification of agriculture over the past 20 years.
(25 September 2007)
Frog deformities linked to farm pollution
Catherine Brahic, New Scientist
Fertiliser run-off could be causing an increase in frog deformities in North American lakes, according to a new study.
Frogs with extra or malformed legs have been a focus of attention in North America since 1995, when schoolchildren in Minnesota studying wetlands found a high number of frogs with missing or extra legs.
Theories abounded on what was causing the malformations (see Freak frogs). Some said pollution was to blame, but in 1999, Pieter Johnson of Stanford University in California, US, showed that a flatworm parasite (Ribeiroia ondatrae) was a major culprit.
But, “at low abundance, Ribeiroia ondatrae does not cause much damage,” says Johnson, now a researcher at the University of Colorado.
He now believes fertiliser pollution may be to blame for boosting the number of parasites in lakes and ponds.
Run-off from non-organic farms contains large amounts of nutrients contained in fertilisers such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which eventually end up enriching the waters in nearby ponds, lakes and rivers – a phenomenon known as eutrophication. According to Johnson, the amount of phosphorus that runs from rivers into the oceans has increased about three-fold since the industrialisation of agriculture.
These enriched waters boost the growth of algae within them, which in turn has a cascade of effects on the local food chain.
(25 September 2007)
Only a Handful Are Lords of the Food Harvest
Gustavo Capdevila, IPS
GENEVA – The food and beverage industry is experiencing a high degree of concentration, with 10 distributing companies controlling 24 percent of the world market, according to a report being studied this week by workers’, employers’ and government representatives gathered by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
The same trend that is seen in sales is found in other stages of the industry, such as manufacture and transformation of food products, said the report’s author, Andrew Bibby, in his presentation of the ILO issues paper being discussed by the 70 participants at the Tripartite Meeting to Examine the Impact of Global Food Chains on Employment.
Bibby said that the strategy of diversification of food supply sources is no longer a novelty in the industry, and is closely linked to the globalisation of economic and trade relations.
What is new is the emergence of integrated world food chains, which employ 22 million people and are therefore a concern of the ILO’s.
At the top of the list of food and beverage companies is the Swiss company Nestlé, with 260,000 employees, followed by the Anglo-Dutch firm Unilever with 179,000 employees, and the United States’ PepsiCo with 157,000 workers, Sara Lee with 137,000, and Coca Cola with 132,300 employees.
(25 September 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
