Miscellany 11/08/07

Linky-dinks for this week: Survey (with Prize!), Alice Waters’ iPhone, Food Frauds, Former Fat Guy Freezes, Pepper, Onions and Egg Whites

The Splendid Table is running a survey on sustainability.  “Completing the survey will automatically enter you to win one of 40 copies of The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution by Alice Waters.” The survey might also give you a chance to participate in a special study.  Survey sez!:“We are looking for individuals and families in all geographic regions of the U.S., who will attempt to purchase at least 80 percent of their food items locally, within a five-state region, in season and organic and sustainably grown. Our objective is to learn what it takes to live by these rules.”

And what about that Alice Waters book, anyway?  Interview on Salon.com about her philosophy and her iPhone, which she would like to throw out a window.

"Does tapping the top of a soda can stop it from foaming?"  Chow sez: no.

Lifehacker post on cooking for the freezer and making your meals just once a month.  And Lifehacker also points you to a post on the Former Fat Guy blog who has a detailed outline on how to best freeze your food.  (Thanks for the tip, Aimee Q!)

Some ingredient-specific tips:

• Pepper, via Accidental Hedonist
• Egg Whites (i.e., what the heck to do with extras) via David Leibovitz
• Onions via Lifehacker (Will refrigerating onions briefly cut down on their eye-irritating quality?  I am very sensitive to this so I am going to try this out next time I use onions.)

Consumerist has a link to Food Frauds.  Kellogg’s Special K Fruit and Yogurt Cereal: no actual berries, probably useless yogurt.  The fact that products like this are sold at all – i.e., a product whose own ingredient list belies its marketing – reinforces to me four areas I wish our education system could improve upon:

1. Home Ec.  Everybody should have to take homemaking class more than once, with nutrition as part of it.  
2. General Science. Better understanding of science in general (i.e., for all students not just those with an aptitude for science) would help people make better decisions about nutritional claims.  
3. Media Awareness. I don’t know if it’s just the four years of film school have given me a special insight into things, but I am often surprised when people don’t, in a general sense, even realize sometimes when and how they are being manipulated, how juxtapositions of images create connections that may or may not actually exist, etc.  
4. General Critical Thinking Skills – without these, all the information in the world is useless and one will always be susceptible to marketing.