Catching up on podcasts this weekend I listened to a few that might interest Ethicurean readers: Fredrick Kaufman talking about America’s eating history, Good Food from KCRW talking about sustainable seafood and backyard chickens, and Paul Roberts talking about his new book “The End of Food” on On Point Radio.

Hansen’s Natural Soda is switching from high fructose corn syrup to sugar. That news, along with record high corn prices, has me wondering if consumption rates of HFCS are changing, and if so, how fast.

The May 20 episode of Quest, the science program on San Francisco’s public television station, had two segments that might be of interest to Ethicurean readers.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is currently hosting a witty installation by Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang. It’s a sculpture of San Francisco made entirely of kitchenware — tongs, graters, pots, serving dishes, tea kettles, and so on. Naturally, each piece is made in China.
The photo above shows the Financial District as viewed […]

Taras Grescoe says he wrote “Bottomfeeder” (Bloomsbury USA, May 2008) for a somewhat selfish reason: he wanted to taste the world’s great seafood dishes — like bouillabaisse in Marseilles, fish and chips in England, bluefin tuna sashimi in Tokyo — before they disappeared or were dramatically changed by our plundering of the oceans. Whatever his motivation, Grescoe has given us a fascinating book that I hope will inform many about the dire state of the oceans, expose the dreadful environmental consequences of badly managed aquaculture, and prompt us to make better seafood choices.

I’ve always been tickled by the pairing of decadence and duty at the Swanton Berry Farm stand at the Berkeley farmers market: sweet, fragrant, addictive strawberries sharing the table with fibrous, disrespected, and most-likely-not-addictive broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. It turns out that this collection makes a lot of agricultural sense, as strawberries are […]

Of all of the alliances between egg and dairy, custard is one of the most interesting to me. Silky in texture, elegant in flavor, acceptable to tastes ranging from unadventurous children to the most discerning adult, it’s a perfect way to enjoy the eggs and milk you worked so hard to source from SOLE producers. […]

The radio program Living on Earth has been running excerpts from "Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape," a book by renowned nature writer Barry Lopez ("Crossing Open Ground," "Arctic Dreams," "Of Wolves and Men") that defines landscape terms such as pack ice, blind creek, and cascade. On a recent program, they featured a […]

The February 25 issue of The New Yorker has an important article by staff writer Michael Specter about some of the economic, logistical, and moral issues related to our individual contributions to the climate crisis* (our "carbon footprints"). In his exploration of the topic, he covers product labeling for food miles, carbon emissions, offset programs, […]

In part 1 of "Bake on the wild side," I wrote about how to create a sourdough starter and some of the science behind it. In this post I’ll tell how I used the starter to make loaves of bread.
There are many different ways to turn sourdough starter into bread: some easy, some complicated. […]

Cocina Poblano. Regional Mexican cuisine complete with a live tortilla bar and a wide selection of high-end tequilas comes to Jack London Square. 499 Embarcadero West (at Washington), Oakland; (510) 451-4700. Lunch, dinner daily; weekend brunch.
—San Francisco Chronicle

I don’t have the budget or time to travel the world seeking dining adventures like Tom Parker Bowles […]

A line of 7,500 trucks stretching 85 miles. That’s what it would take to haul the nearly 300 million pounds of meat and poultry products that were recalled between January 1, 1994, and November 30, 2007, in 773 separate incidents. These eye-popping numbers come from the appendix of a Congressional Research Service […]

As a follow-up to Tom Philpott’s post about genetically modified crops (also known as transgenic or genetically engineered crops), I thought I’d post some data on transgenic crop adoption in the United States. Because products made from transgenic crops are never labeled, it is probably not well known that over 70 percent of […]

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been in the news a lot lately.
Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle had a front page story about the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. One of the causes is the routine addition of antibiotics to animal feed as "growth promoters" — including some antibiotics used for treatment of humans.
In a New York Times […]

At a meeting of the South Dakota Corn Growers Association on January 5, 2008, Acting Secretary of Agriculture Chuck Conner had much to say about the current state of corn and renewable fuels. After extolling our nation’s glorious efforts in making ethanol from corn, Conner commented:

Our growing appetite for renewable fuels and the standards […]