Fast In A Food Desert

Surrounded by nutritional nothingness?

In the corner of America where convenient stores are the major source of anything edible - is sustenance possible?

Putting a meal together in a place where sugar, salt and saturated fats are the rule is like trying to make literature out of tabloids. Peanut candy bars and peanut butter could be the only actual protein, while the sole produce choice might be a can of tomato juice.

If you live in the poorest places in America, you can no longer pick an apple, or grapefruit off a tree. There are no victory gardens, there are no collard greens and turnips. Being poor used to mean you ate less food, maybe less expensive food, but the food you ate was still real food. Potatoes might have been all your budget could bear but the potatoes were organic, they were not sprayed with pesticides, nor infused with saturated fat like and stuffed like a pack of pencils into a dioxin bleached paper bag.

Being poor used to mean you ate the cheapest cuts of meat - but the meat you ate was not injected with hormones and antibiotics. It was just organ meat - which was perfectly safe to eat - free from the contaminants that keep modern day diners from daring to ingest liver from modern day livestock.

Today's impoverished Americans are left to survive in conditions worse than the potato famine. Liquor stores and fast food restaurants make up basic food group choices. Does one count whiskey as a grain? Or wine as a serving of fruit?

People are so disconnected from knowledge of food sources that even though they are being virtually starved to death for adequate nutrition, no one digs up the blacktop in search of a place to plant a single seed that might one day grow into an actual vegetable. Instead, people continue to go unnourished and unnoticed in broad daylight in the food deserts claiming the lives of so many of America's poor.

Comments

Do YOU Need Some Incubation?

Ever wanted to start your own food business? Can Campbell’s get you into the soup? A new opportunity poked its shiny beak into the food industry last month when Campbell Soup Company ( www.campbellsoupcompany.com ) in conjunction with Foodworks of Brooklyn ( www.thefoodworks.com ) – a food start-up for entrepreneurs, held the Real Food Innovation Challenge. The Challenge gave three food biz beginners the chance to secure funding to help their food fantasies come true. Seven finalists were chosen from nearly forty competitors in a preliminary pitch session, who then peddled their ideas to Campbell’s panel of judges and a live audience. In the final phase of the competition, held July 25th, winners had to demonstrate that their product used known and favored ingredients, had foundational business and marketing plans, outstanding palatability, and answered consumer need. They were judged by a panel that included Carlos Abrams-Rivera, President of ...

Backyard Guacamole

There is guacamole and then there is guacamole. There is the kind you get in the supermarket in round, plastic tubs. This is plastic guacamole that has the slippery feel and taste of the container it comes in. It is a little too pea green, face-foundation pureed, and useful only for a first rate Mexican food emergency. No guacamole should ever represent such panicked urgency. Then there is kitchen-made guacamole. You hope the avocado is ripe enough. The knife neatly slashes the pit and is ejected into a bowl for puncture with toothpicks, water emersion and sprouting later on in the dark of the cabinet below the kitchen sink. It is masticated by a fork and doused with a shot of salsa. In the end, it will work on tostadas, or as the final dollop on a taco....

Stabbing At Steak Cuisine

Serving up steak is not for amateurs – Sous Vide, Brasserie-Style . . . There is no shortage of methods to prepare steak in the culinary universe, and no scarcity of chefs to create them. Chef Tesar of Dallas’ restaurant Knife , has developed a seering technique using canola or grapeseed oil, that he features in his new book, Knife: Texas Steakhouse Meals at Home . His method relies on a a cast iron, or carbon steel pan. It is also dependent on removing as much liquid from the meat as possible before cooking. Three to four days in the refrigerator unwrapped, lying on a regularly refreshed swath of paper towel, will do the trick. Tesar’s method is supposed to yield up the most succulent steak ever tasted. This method honestly reminds me of cooking tofu – the steak alternative, which also relies on liquid removal with paper towels before cooking. But steak is not tofu and tofu is not steak. More on tofu later… If you are looking for the ultimat...

Kaleb Gaudinier GreenField FoodYield

Search This Blog