Perpetual Carouse

As an undergrad, I used to live in a student co-op. Amongst the freaks and geeks I lived with was this couple, whose names escape me at the moment. They were both skinny and pimply and extremely malnourished.

The house featured a large kitchen, stocked to the gills with all sorts of tasty food, and there were daily dinners cooked by residents which were surprisingly good, stupid hippy girls’ flavor- and spice-free meals nonwithstanding (It took me years after that to learn that
“vegetarian” doesn’t mean “tastes like nothing”).

Skinny Pimply Girl was kind of a bitch. She didn’t really have many friends, other than Skinny Pimply Guy, and neither of them interacted much with anyone else in the house. The one thing I remember about them is that for dinner, they’d cook themselves this enormous plate of
steamed (frozen) corn and peas, and sit at the far end of the dining room eating their plain veggies and whispering to each other.It was fucking weird. That was all they ate…ever.

I was reminded of Skinny Pimply Couple recently when I stumbled upon an article about calorie restriction in New York Magazine. Julian Dibbell spent two months following a strict CR diet, and writes about his experience and hosting a dinner party for the CR elite.

The basic premise of calorie restriction is that by severely limiting your food intake, you get better nutrition, and live significantly longer. On the front page of Calorie Restriction Society
website, there’s even a helpful graph that shows that lab rats given severely limited diets live significantly longer than rats fed normal rat diets. Which so obviously makes calorie restriction a great idea.

Everyone knows that humans are practically identical to lab rats, plus,
it totally doesn’t matter that we can’t actually talk to the rats to
hear about how fucking starving they are and how much they hate their
calorie-restricted lives.

At first, Dibbell seems to be getting into the whole calorie restriction thing. He’s losing weight, feeling better, but getting together with big-time CR folks, he starts noticing things. Like how CR
blogger April Smith loves the “pretty” way her boyfriend’s hands are turning orange because of all the carrots and such that he’s consuming. Or how the CR gold-standard protein is Quorn, some fungus-based, highly processed pseudo-meat product that actual food-eating people seem to hate. Or the obsessive-compulsive measuring and calculating that a CR diet
requires. Or how CR folk manage to spin the loss of muscle and bone (in
addition to fat) positively.

It’s all very interesting, and by interesting I mean “fucking weird.” Admittedly, I’m not the healthiest guy on the planet, but it seems to me that a food philosophy that requires a thorough explication of how it’s not anorexia is suspect from the get-go. I fear the lady doth protest too much.

Despite all the CR folks’ claims that the diet is about health, not about appearance, April Smith seems a bit bummed that she looks “bizarrely chunky” in the magazine.

[Note: Sometime after I read her blog, Smith edited the entry to remove her complaints about looking fat, although comments remained that alluded to the text that she deleted.]

Me, I’d rather eat bacon and drink beer every now and then. What good is living to be 120 when you’re orange, without strong bones or muscles, and tricking yourself into believing that fake meat products are actually enjoyable to eat?

There’s an amazing expose on dallasfood.org about Noka chocolate, supposedly the most expensive chocolate in the world. Notice I said “most expensive,” not “best.”

Noka gets a lot of play out of being the most expensive chocolate in the world, apparently from people either too rich to care, or too stupid to not understand that price and quality are not the same thing. In fact, in Noka’s case, it seems that the company actively engages in misinformation as a promotional strategy for its brand.

While they attempt to position themselves as makers of ultra-premium chocolate worth $2,000 a pound (no joke), Noka is in reality a marketing myth, repackaging and reselling chocolate that retails around $35 a pound, and wholesales for much, much less. And yes, while a cool stainless steel box and the aura that high-end marketing creates are
worth something, you have to wonder about a company that is so evasive about how it sources its product, especially when other (higher-profile) chocolatiers are more than happy to talk about their sources.

Don’t miss the priceless photo of Noka's HQ sandwiched between two hair salons in a Plano, Texas strip mall.

I got quoted in a Budget Travel article about Ghetto Gourmet. I'm reasonably certain I had something far more insightful to say than "It's great," but then again we had polished off a bottle before I spoke to the writer, so I'm just glad she didn't write "...slurred Ray Aguilera."

OMG! Slashfood found a tiny bell pepper inside another pepper.

What's worse, them posting about it, or me posting about them posting about it.

It's totally me.

As if being responsible for the beer that most tastes like piss (I'm guessing...but I do know what the beer tastes like) isn't enough, Anhueser Busch is now bringing us Spykes, little bottled shots of alcoholic nastiness in flavors like "Hot Melons" (seriously!) and "Hot Chocolate." The Spykes website suggests that they're perfect for adding to a beer (to hide the piss-taste, presumably) or to do as a standalone shot.

MSNBC is reporting that anti-underage-drinking folks are up in arms, and AB is playing Rainman on the question of whether or not they're marketing to teens.

As if the ringtones, screensavers, and IM icons available on the Spykes website weren't dead giveaways.

" Oh..we're very aware of the important contribution of our Lateeeno population." Then, proudly boasted about the good works Beard House has been doing on their behalf: " Why...just last week at a dinner at the House, 7 out of 10 of the waiters we hired were Lateeno!"
She looked at me, guilessly, as if expecting a pat on the head.
-Anthony Bourdain, on a recent conversation with Beard Foundation muckety-muck, via Ruhlman.

Joe. My. God. reports that Out magazine is naming the Times' "Gay Mafia" (including Frank Bruni) as the seventh most powerful gay man/woman/collective entity in America.

They're also outing...

Edible Estates is an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent.
Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a domestic garden.
Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the American front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people.

Unfortunately, I don't have a front lawn, but if I did I'd be ripping that sucker out and planting a garden.

I'm kind of a geek when it cones to old cookbooks and recipes. I absolutely love reading about all these old-school things that we don't really cook or eat anymore. Things like weird Jell-o molds and stuff like that. I'm not really interested in actually eating any of this...but I do like reading about it. It's amazing how food is so intricately connected to time and place, and how reading about food from a different era is almost like being in a time machine.

My friend Jane stumbled across an issue of the San Francisco News from July 25, 1941 (click the graphic for a readable version). On the front page, above the fold, was this story about a society BBQ from back in the day when "the Woodside-Atherton summer colony" was a rustic getaway for city-dwellers. Now, the entire area is a pricey part of the ginormous stretch of suburbia that stretches between San Francisco and San Jose and beyond.

Props to Mrs. Betty Downey Westphal, who managed to rock out eight turkeys with a family-secret orange, white wine, and tarragon sauce; all while keeping "fresh as a daisy." You can be certain I would not be that fresh after that much cookery. More like greasy and beer-stained.

My friend Jane comes through once again with an awesome find: a copy of The Art of Barbecue and Outdoor Cooking, originally published in the 1950's. It's filled with spectacularly bad recipes for all sorts of mid-century culinary delights, things like Franks in Silver, or a Hobo Special For One.

The best (worst?) part is the book's insistence on ingredients like "processed American cheese" and its fascination with stuffing minced-up things into other things...along with great section headers like "Let's Have a Hobo Picnic."

Recipes coming soon, although since this particular culinary gem is a BookCrossing book, perhaps one day you'll be lucky enough to cross paths with it yourself.

"While potatoes may be deep-fried in the nude, most foods require protection."
-John Hodgman

John Hodgman has a 2003 Men's Journal article on his blog about his experimentations deep frying various and sundry food items. Definitely worth a read, even if the deep-fried Twinkie craze is now behind us.

I had a deep-fried Twinkie once, sadly. Even worse was the fact that I had spent about 20 minutes walking around a street fair seeking it out. 20 minutes walking around in the sun with no beer is too much expectation to put on a Twinkie. It was doomed to fail.

The part that most surprised me was that the Twinkie itself seemed to vaporize under the fried batter. I was expecting a crunch, then that rubbery sponge cake. What I got was crunch, then this weird liquidy mush inside. I'm fairly certain I threw the rest of it away.

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As I mentioned before, a friend of mine found a fantastically bad BBQ cookbook called The Art of Barbecue and Outdoor Cooking circa 1958.

Perpetual Carouse proudly presents:

Hobo Special For One*

1/2 pound ground beef
1/4 tsp. salt
pepper
1 tbps. chopped parsley
1 tsp. chopped onion
1 small carrot, cut into strips
2 small onions, peeled
3 slices potato, cut 1/2 inch thick
10 olives
1/2 ear of corn
salt and pepper to taste

You'll need a one-pound coffee can with lid.

Combine beef, salt, pepper, parsley and onion. Shape meat into a patty the size of the bottom of the coffee can. Place a meat patty in each can. Layer with carrot strips, onions, potato slices, olives, and corn. Salt and pepper to taste. Cover tightly with coffee can lid. Nestle cans in hot coals, and cook for one hour, or until vegetables are tender.

*I'm paraphrasing the cooking instructions, because, well, retyping them was a pain. And there's that whole copyright law thing, too. Plus they weren't really all that technical anyway. The ingredients, however, are straight out of the book.

The SF Bay Guardian ran an article this week about an absentee landlord who booted an impromptu community garden off her land. Owner Aileen O'Driscoll has let her vacant lot fill with trash and weeds for as long as anyone can remember. Earlier this year neighbors took the initiative to clean up the lot, turning a longtime neighborhood eyesore into a garden.

O'Driscoll refuses to negotiate with the gardeners, and has demanded that the plants be torn out. Apparently, bare dirt, weeds and trash are preferable to a thriving garden, and the woman has even refused the gardeners' attempts to lease the land from her.

Chow's got a short list of cheap kitchen gear just as good/better than the expensive stuff, and for the most part, I agree with their list.

I'm certainly guilty of overspending on certain gear, but frankly, you'll have to pry my All-Clad chef's pan out of my cold, dead hands. Same goes for my Global knives (although I hate the shape of the handles). My little-used but much-appreciated Cuisinart falls into the same category. Expensive, and worth every penny.

I'd say Chow's best picks are the restaurant-supply sheet pans, and Lodge cast iron. I'm big fans of both, and it kills me to watch people buy $40 baking sheets and $150 grill pans in fancy kitchen-porn shops.

It's also pretty easy to get good deals on the expensive stuff, too. We're always on the hunt for Le Creuset at garage sales, antique shops and discount stores, although the antique shops seem to be catching on lately and jacking up the prices. Thanks to the lifetime warranty, a cracked/chipped/otherwise fucked up Le Creuset will be replaced free by the company for the price of shipping it to them. And there's always the outlets.
[All-Clad, Le Creuset]

Everyone is obsessed with where their food comes from. We love to talk about it, read about it, think about it. People go to the farmers' market once a month for three heirloom tomatoes and pat themselves on the back for eating locally. The sad reality though is that we're not exactly eating the way we pretend to be. Three tomatoes does not a factory-farm-crushing movement make.

I'm guilty of it myself. I live close to a good-sized, well-priced, year-round farmers' market. For the first few months, we went pretty regularly, almost every Saturday. Almost every Thursday, we'd end up throwing out about 50% of the stuff bought the previous weekend. We always had the best intentions, and the best food-porn fantasies of some sort of urban (urbane?) Martha Stewart-ish life overflowing with the freshest local products consumed at their nutritional and culinary peak.

Unfortunately, it always seems easier to stock up on more shelf-stable, reliable (read: imported from Chile in the off-season) produce at our local chain store. Now add in the fact that, contrary to farmers' market propaganda, eating locally and seasonably translates into spending more cash. It's easy to see why most people most of the time just say "fuck it" and go to Safeway instead.

This idea of eating locally has always appealed to me for both reasons of taste as well as politics. Food that ripened on the vine tastes better than food that ripened in a box on the floor of a food distributor's warehouse. The closer it was made to you, the better it tastes, and the less time it spent traveling in a big-rig wasting gasoline and getting old. Buying local products supports local people. I probably buy a lot more locally than the average American already. But can I live on local products alone?

I recently stumbled across the The Eat Local Challenge, a bunch of food folks basically challenging themselves to eat food produced within a one hundred mile radius of home for a week.

Further, this challenge is about trying to eat local within the budget for the "average" American family. Whoever those people are, they must be eating like crap. For a household with two working adults, that budget is $144.

Why do this?

To prove that it can (or can't) be done. And to raise questions about the state of food production and consumption in this country.

$144 a week. I hate to say it, but that's only a bit more than we spend each week on lunch in downtown San Francisco. But that's what we're going to try and live on for seven days.

The Chron's got pretty extensive coverage on The Eat Local Challenge. As I mentioned, we're going to be giving it a whirl starting tomorrow.

Already I can see some of the difficulties. Sticking to the budget is going to be the big one. The other is that there isn't really salt, pepper, flour, or a zillion other things I cook with all the time within a hundred miles of my kitchen. I was talking with a friend of mine, and he asked about restaurants. He pointed out that even restaurants that emphasize local products get a lot of stuff from far-away lands.

The way I look at it, this isn't an exercise in limitation. I'm taking it on as an opportunity to enjoy exploring the things around me, rather than fretting over where I'm going to find locally-produced cornmeal. It's rather telling that the most successful of the Chron's guinea-pigs were a retired couple who've been doing this for years, and restaurant-owners, although the less-connected, more time-constricted city-slicker made a good go. I don't have the time, or the experience required to spend my week hunting down every last ingredient. And that's fine for me.

As I mentioned to my friend, I'll be happy with an organic scone or loaf of bread from a locally-owned bakery. If the flour wasn't made in a shed in the back, it's not going to ruin my day. I'm approaching this whole thing as realistically as possible. We can't eat entirely locally. But that doesn't make trying to eat closer to home not worth working on.

Besides, anything that gives me an excuse to eat awesome cheese and drink good hooch can't be bad, right?

In light of the LA Times' reccomendations for a poor-man's sous-vide, Megnut did a little sleuthing into the dangers of plastic.

Turns out that both freezer bags and the vacuum seal bags the pros use are both made with polyethylene, a plastic that melts around 115 degrees, give or take a few.

Ergo, eat really tender and delicious meats at your peril.

Guess who's on the front page of TasteSpotting right now?

If you haven't seen it yet, TasteSpotting is a evolving collection of beautiful food photos... and a great way to find interesting food-related sites. Highly recommended.

[Here's the image, if it's no longer on the site.]

Sammy Hagar still can't drive 55, but he can sell his Cabo Wabo-brand tequila for 80.

$80 Million, that is.

I recently did an interview with Kara Zuaro, author of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen With Your Favorite Bands. If you're unfamilliar, it's a collection of recipes from mostly indie-rock bands including Death Cab For Cutie, Camera Obscura, Calexico, Belle and Sebastian, The Violent Femmes and a ton of others. The interview is pending publication elsewhere, but look for an extended version-- plus a special bonus recipe straight from Kara's grandma-- here at Perpetual Carouse soon.

In the meantime, pick up a copy here. Where else are you going to find The Decemberists' pork loin recipe (the preparation of which does not involve wearing pantaloons, by the way)?

There's an interesting post about the 2007 James Beard Awards over at Serious Eats, specifically about the conspicuous lack of non-white people in attendance. Given that the restaurant industry on virtually every level pretty much lives and dies by the the labor of immigrants and people of color, it does seem at least noteworthy that the crowd at such an event skews so Caucasian. Ed Levine described the event thusly: "It was like being at a hockey game, only everyone was wearing tuxes."

It seems this self-segregation-- some might say racism-- isn't going unnoticed, but what's really being done? If Bourdain's blog post from a few weeks back tells us anything, it's that the Beard Foundation isn't doing a whole lot to help matters, and underrepresentation of non-white people in the food world is certainly not exclusive to them.

I live in one of the most racially diverse cities in America, but whenever I go anywhere that isn't fast-food, the racial makeup certainly doesn't match the demographics of the area. Socioeconomics certainly plays a role, but that isn't the whole story. Perhaps it's time to start thinking a bit about what other forces are at work, especially in an industry where people of color perform the bulk of the work for a tiny slice of the proverbial pie. It's not my intent to get too political here, but the situation certainly is hard to ignore, especially when the photographic evidence is so teling.

Via Instructables: Make your own chocolate Han Solo in carbonite. Totally awesome. The technique can be applied to just about anything, but seeing as I don't have Han Solo in carbonite laying around, I might have to settle for chocolate dog toys or chocolate house keys or chocolate half-empty bottles of Maker's Mark.

Well, not me thankfully.

Over at Applesauce, there's a post about a woman accidentally eating a $62 burger at Laurent Tourondel's joint in NYC. Bummer! Apparently she ordered the American Kobe burger ($12) and received (and was billed for) the $62 Japanese Kobe version. If she was indeed served the Japanese version, I figure it's the restaurant's problem. If you've got two items with nearly identical names and vastly different prices on your menu, your staff better be making damn sure they're getting the orders correct.

I've never had Japanese Kobe, but I can't imagine it would be that much better than any decent local beef, Kobe-style or not. I'm guessing that whole point-of-diminishing-returns thing probably kicks in at around $10 for a burger. I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong; if you've got some Kobe to send me, get in touch.

I've started reading Julie & Julia, the book that came from The Julie/Julia Project blog.

The idea was that Julie Powell was going to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year... in her small New York apartment kitchen.

So far, I'm not too impressed with the book. The original blog is pretty entertaining, but in book form it's just not working for me. There are these fictionalized accounts of Julia Child's life that completely break the flow, and I'm not really sure why anyone would be interested in Julia Child fiction anyway. I suspect that the book deal might have been based on creating a certain amount of new material that hadn't appeared in the blog or something.

I also wish the book would talk more about the food. The book seems focused on the personal dramas surrounding such a huge undertaking, but somehow I just haven't gotten drawn in enough to care about the author's brother, or her friend Sally, or the fact that Julie and her husband aren't having sex all that often. I would be interested in the trials and tribulations of classic French cuisine in a shitty apartment kitchen, though.

I'm sticking with it, for now. Maybe it'll grow on me, but my first impression is that the blog was more interesting than the book. But what do I know? She did score a six-figure advance on Julie & Julia, and I read somewhere that the advance on her next book was significantly larger, although of course I can't find a source now that I'm looking for it.

Chow is reporting that at least one of Top Chef loser Foam Boy's Marcel Vigneron's recipes for a recent Wired article is cribbed from a nearly identical preparation by Wylie Dufresne at WD-50. Marcel of course added a foam...an innovation pioneered by Ferran Adria years ago. Dufresne is reportedly not amused.

In other Top Chef news, season one winner Harold Dieterle finally opened Perilla this month.

Come on. You know you've always wanted to try Dwight Yoakam's Chicken Lickin's Buffalo Style Bites.

Thankfully, Biggles over at Meathenge sacrificed himself to the bites, so nobody else has to.

Do the Buffalo Style Bites belong to Chicken Lickin, or does Dwight Yoakam just have apostrophe-abusing copywriters?

132 people waited overnight in the parking lot of Phoenix Chick-fil-A restaurant for the chance to win 52 free meals at the restaurant. The first 100 customers through the door at 6:30 the next morning got the goods, and the other 32 people got...a chance to win 52 free meals.

If you missed out, don't worry. The restaurant does a similar promotion every time a new outpost opens, and ChickenPack keeps tabs on new store openings (although curiously the site doesn't mention the Phoenix opening).

And by the way... Chick-fil-A is a big supporter of Focus on the Family, James Dobson's ultra-conservative, gay-bashing, right-wing Christian "nonprofit," so depending on which way you swing, you shouldn't eat there. Or eat there a lot, I guess. Just so you know.

In the grand tradition of enbacon'd sweet things, Vanilla Garlic has a recipe for bacon maple cupcakes.

Oh yeah!

Photo: Roger Kisby

As promised, here's an extended version of my interview with Kara Zuaro, author of the new cookbook I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands. The book's got recipes from a wide range of indie-rockers, including Death Cab for Cutie, The Hold Steady, The Decemberists, The Violent Femmes and about a jillion other awesome bands.

Dying to know which Scottish band's cuisine would reign supreme in an Iron Chef-style battle? Read on. And stay tuned in the next few days for an exclusive recipe straight from Kara's grandma.

There's an interesting article on the 20/20 website about the results of a vodka taste-test. They had a panel of vodka drinkers taste five premium vodkas neat, including Ketel One, Belvedere, Hangar One, Stoli Elit, and Grey Goose. In addition, the panelists tasted run-of-the-mill Smirnoff.

In an apparent victory for luxury marketing over taste, all six tasters uniformly hated Grey Goose, which most had claimed as their preferred vodka. Unsurprisingly (to me at least) my beloved Hangar One did well in the "neat" test. At the distillery, you taste the vodka in exactly the same way: straight and at room temperature, a perfect opportunity to pick up on the fruity tones from the Viogner grapes Hangar One is made from.

When it came to tasting vodkas in a cocktail (in this case a Sex & The City-inspired Cosmopolitan) tasters had an even tougher time picking out their proclaimed favorites. The article unfortunately doesn't offer any numeric breakdown of the results, but it's implied that none of the tasters were able to identify their preferred brand. Given that the cocktail they chose incorporates cranberry and lime juices, as well as a sticky-sweet orange liqueur, I'm not surprised by that, either.

Had they been tasting vodka & tonics, or even a classic gimlet, I'm sure the differences between vodkas would have been more noticeable, although that still doesn't mean Grey Goose would have won.

The 20/20 website suggests that the moral of the story is that well vodka is just as good as premium, but what I take from it is that most people are buying marketing hype, not a vodka that they actually appreciate for its own qualities.

For all you meatball fans, a couple of bonus recipes, courtesy of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good author Kara Zuaro.

One of my favorite meals to share with hungry touring bands is spaghetti with my Grandma Martha Zuaro's meatballs and sauce. This is so good that whenever my big, loud Italian family sits down to eat it, a quiet falls over the table. Then, Grandma always breaks the silence by asking, "So, how do you like my balls?" Or, if the little cousins aren't around, she'll say, "How do you like my freakin' balls?" See for yourself – but I think they're pretty freakin' delicious.
-Kara Zuaro

Grandma Martha's Freakin' Meatballs

• 1 pound chopped meat (I use 85% lean ground round)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup Italian-style breadcrumbs
• 1/2 cup grated Pecorino-Romano cheese
• 1/2 cup Italian (flat-leaf) parsley, chopped
• 1 packet of onion soup mix
• 1 teaspoon of soy sauce
• 1 capful of Kitchen Bouquet (browning and seasoning sauce)
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• salt, pepper, and garlic powder, to taste
• 2 tablespoons ketchup
• 1 teaspoon basil
• olive oil, for frying

When all the ingredients are combined, roll into small, golf ball-sized meatballs, and set aside on a piece of waxed paper or on a cutting board.

Coat the bottom of a pan with olive oil, and place over medium-high heat. Fry the meatballs in batches until they are well browned. Don't fill up the pan to tightly – you'll need room to roll the meatballs around so they cook evenly.

You can test for doneness by cutting a meatball in half – if it's not rare inside, it's ready to go.

Drain meatballs on brown paper bags to absorb excess oil, and start making some sauce. My grandma makes her meatballs in the morning, and then simmers them in homemade sauce all day.

Yields 15-18 small meatballs

Grandma Martha's Sauce

• 1/2 large onion, chopped
• olive oil
• 4-5 (or more) cloves of garlic, sliced or pressed
• 4 28-oz. cans crushed Red Pack tomatoes (put through the blender for a smoother sauce)
• 4 28-oz. cans of water (measured after you dump out the tomatoes)
• 15-oz. can of tomato sauce
• 1 packet of onion soup mix (mixed with a little hot water to help dissolve it)
• 2 capfuls of gravy master
• salt and pepper
• red wine
• oregano
• basil
• 4 bay leaves

Sauté the onion in some olive oil over medium heat until it's soft and translucent. Add the garlic and stir for a minute or two.

Add the tomatoes, water, sauce, onion soup mix, and gravy master. Turn up the heat and bring the sauce to a low simmer.

Add the salt, pepper, red wine, oregano, basil, and bay leaves to taste, and adjust the seasonings as needed as the sauce simmers. Grandma starts early in the morning and lets it simmer all day – the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.

Lately I've been kind of obsessed with Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. That book, combined with the recent Eat Local Challenge is changing the way I think about food and food production in this country. Admittedly, I still fall short when it comes to eating totally locally/sustainably, but I'm certainly trying a lot harder than I ever did before, which has to count for something.

Via Ruhlman, I found an article about the National Animal Identification System. Ostensibly, NAIS is a plan by the USDA to track farm animals in order to reduce outbreaks of disease. Sounds like a good thing, right? Everyone wants to eat a nice clean rib-eye steak.

The jist of NAIS is that every location where livestock is grown would be assigned a numeric code, and every individual animal would also be given another code, via an implanted RFID tag. All this data gets pumped into some ginormous national database, and then the government could track disease outbreaks, and have the ability to find any other animals a diseased animal might have had contact with. Healthy food for everyone, in theory at least.

Alas, it turns out that NAIS is less about food safety than it is about presererving business interests: the interests of factory farms, and the interests of companies that manufacture the equipment that would be used to track the animals. The plan was hatched by a private organization that consists mostly of factory farming interests like Cargill, Monsanto, the National Pork Producers Council and the National Renderers Association. Oh yeah, the guys that make the tracking devices (Cattle-Traq and Digital Angel) are down with the plan too. There's a bazillion cows and chickens and pigs out there, and at about a buck a head, there's lots of money to be made microchipping our future food.

NAIS would definitely hurt the little guy. The costs associated with tracking are fairly fixed, but a small farmer with less livestock has fewer opportunitites to recoup that cost. The result? Prices go up, and it's one more way the small farmer can't stay competitive with the big boys. Factory farms, on the other hand, can spread the costs amongst thousands of animals they "process" every day, and the new systems are easy to integrate into tracking systems they already use.

The worst part is that, while factory farms are the only ones that would benefit from the system, (mostly in the form of better PR) they're the ones with the conditions that cause all of the nasty diseases that NAIS is claiming to try to prevent. And to add insult to injury, all NAIS proposes to do is track animals. There's nothing in the plan that attempts to address the problems with factory farming that would actually make our food safer. It's all just number crunching... and dollar signs, of course.

For more information on helping to protect the little guy, check out NoNAIS.org.

Over at Eater, Mario Batali blogs (ahem!) about hating blogs.

If anything, Batali's rant makes me think the lady doth protest too much. First of all, he rails against "anonymous bloggers" but that strikes me as a "sky is falling" kind o