Archives for the 'Banned' Category
Chicago’s Foie Gras Ban is Dead!
Minutes ago, Chicago’s dreaded, idiotic foie gras ban died a deservedly graceless death, reports the Chicago Tribune.
With Mayor Richard Daley running the vote, the Chicago City Council on Wednesday repealed its controversial ban on foie gras.
Over the shouted objections of Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ban’s sponsor, the council used a parliamentary manuever to put the ordinance on the floor for a vote.
On to California!
Congratulations to all who worked to overturn the ban, and especially to Didier Durand and Chicago Chefs for Choice. This is truly a great day for liberté du choix.
Crispy on foie here. Read my 2007 profile of Chicago Chefs for Choice and Durand here.
UK BK Flirts with £85 Foie Burger
Best done in the voice of that movie voiceover guy…
In a land ruled by a queen… an upstart king tries to lure customers with a golden goose… against the wishes of a ninny prince… and PETA… and some other, lesser-known group of anti-humans…
This summer, it’s Burger King: Home of the Foie-pper Gras-pper .
Coming soon to a theater theatre near you.
04/20/09
So it didn’t occur to me how great it would be if I were to write a completely serious piece on pairing food with 4/20 until yesterday–a day late. That’s when I read this in the Chicago Tribune:
One 39-year-old Chicago professional, who didn’t want his named used for obvious reasons, said he’s all set to host his fourth annual 420 party.
“We serve pizza rolls, Lit’l Smokies, all kinds of candy bars—the munchies-food I guess you’d expect,” he said.
So I’m totally on the ball for next year. Reminder to self.
Read my 2004 interview with then-High Times editor (formerly one of People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people) John Buffalo Mailer here.
Boston Bans Big Booze Bottles
Boston is trying to become what South Carolina was until recently–home of small bottles of booze. Boston’s not looking to shrink things down to mini-bottle size, but the city’s licensing board chair is on the hunt against full bottles of booze and, it seems, booze in general.
“This is totally prohibited and it won’t be tolerated,” [Boston Licensing Board Chairman Daniel F.] Pokaski said. “It’s not going to happen in Boston. It’s just wrong. It forces alcohol consumption.”
[…]
Pokaski said [selling alcohol in large bottles] violates so-called “happy hour” laws that ban serving more than two drinks at a time to a patron.
[…]
“We’re not New York and we’re not South Beach,” he said. “The city of Boston has a lot more to offer than just getting people inebriated. If all they can offer their clientele is just swilling down alcohol, then perhaps they shouldn’t be in the business.”
Hear that New York and Miami? Boston isn’t like you: towns full of low-class, drunkards. No, Boston is civilized, classy, and intellectual, and… hey, wait just a minute!
I’m not sure what bizarro Boston Chairman Pokanski lives in. The Boston I grew up just outside is hardly bereft of places that offer their clientele little more than the opportunity to drink alcohol. Bars, Daniel. They’re called bars. And Bostonians like them as much as the next person–maybe more.
More here. Bostonians, New Yorkers, and South Beachians, let Pokanski know what you think of him and his neo-Prohibitionist, d-bag ways here.
Hey Brit Kids, Watch This and Click Here
A British law against showing ads for so-called “junk food” to kids on the telly is writhing in defeat, apparently, due to something called Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, a popular TV show in which ads play a central role. The problem, as the whining nannies see it, is that, though it’s an adult show, kids like Ant and Dec, too, and so the show should be relegated to showing only ads for celery, watercress, or barley.
A ban was introduced in January on adverts for foods high in salt, sugar or fat during programmes whose viewers were mainly under the age of 16. It did not, however, affect the programmes with an audience mainly made up of adults, even though many more children watch them.
Among the programmes affected was the children’s cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants, which attracts about 170,000 child viewers. But Saturday Night Takeaway, a family show watched by more than a million children, was not.
New research has concluded the number of times children watch junk-food adverts during these family programmes has risen in the past two years by 26 per cent. The figures come from Dr Will Cavendish, director of health and wellbeing at the Department of Health, who described the trend as “worrying” at a time when almost a third of 11-year-olds are classified as overweight or obese.
In a report to the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum, Dr Cavendish said ministers could take tougher action. “We know large numbers of children are still seeing TV ads for high fat, sugar and salt food and drink, though in programmes not specifically aimed at children,” he wrote.
The figures will fuel calls for a total ban on junk food ads before the 9pm watershed. A private member’s Bill to that effect, introduced by the Labour MP Nigel Griffiths, will receive its second reading this month. It aims also to create “significant restrictions” on marketing on the internet.
Restrict this. And this, this, this, and this. More here.
Remembering When Booze Was Back
I’m not 100 years old, so I don’t actually remember when FDR–convinced he should at least do one thing right during his seven or eight presidential terms–put the final nail in Prohibition on this date in 1933.
At Pabst Brewing Co. in Milwaukee, thousands of onlookers cheered as company employees hoisted barrels and crates onto trucks. About 800 people stood in the rain outside the White House, watching as a man hopped out of his vehicle and unloaded two cases of beer. Secret Service agents accepted the goods, a gift for the chief executive from one of the nation’s brewers. “President Roosevelt,” read a sign on the side of the truck, “the first real beer is yours.”
None of that highbrow PBR for me. I’ll be celebrating tonight the same way I did last night: with some damn fine Mickey’s Malt Liquor widemouths.
More on the end of Prohibition here and here.
My friend Sean Higgins interviewed the head of the U.S. Prohibition Party–yep, that’s a political party fighting to ban booze–last year for the unabashedly awesome Modern Drunkard.
Update: For accuracy’s sake, instead of “booze,” I should have stated “low-alcohol beer was back,” as Jacob rightly notes in comments.
Food at the Fore of Cuban Government’s Baby Steps
It’s only taken five decades, and it hardly seems dramatic to outsiders who enjoy daily freedoms, but the Cuban government is finally moving–glacially–to recognize private property and private employment.
In a country where almost everyone works for the communist state, dairy farmer Jesus Diaz is his own boss. He likes it that way — and so does the government.
Living on a plot of land just big enough to graze four dairy cows, Diaz produces enough milk to sell about four quarts a day to the state.
This is independent production on a tiny scale, but it has proved so efficient that Cuba has decided on a major expansion of its program to distribute underused and fallow farmland to private farmers and cooperatives.
More here. IMO, a regime that’s ruined its citizens’ lives for half a century doesn’t deserve any credit for finally accepting the obvious. Learn about the guy at the top of the list of probably billions of people who could have told Cuba so here.
LA Confuses Catering with Loitering, Hates on Tacos
From LA Now, the LA Times’s SoCalCentric blog:
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is considering a new law that could leave the owners of taco and catering trucks facing jail time if they park in the same spot too long.
Currently, the food trucks that overstay the 30-minute limit in unincorporated Los Angeles County are subject only to a fine. But, as the San Gabriel Valley Tribune notes, the ordinance proposed by Supervisor Gloria Molina makes the violation a misdemeanor, which can carry jail time.
This is, um, bad. Food (including beer and wine) is pretty much the only great thing about 12% nation.** And taco trucks are pretty much the best thing about food in California. Which means that this new LA law is not only bad for California but bad for America.
**I apparently just coined this term, which refers to the fact California makes up 12% of the U.S. population.
English Nanny State Laws Set to Silence Pub Banter
Andy Capp is rolling in his grave, as new English anti-discrimination laws set to take effect on Sunday are keen on taking the banter out of the pub. The Morning Advertiser explains:
New discrimination laws to make employers liable for customers behaviour may make banter with the barmaid a thing of the past.
Landlords who allow sexist jokes or even words like “darling” or “love” at the bar could be taken before tribunal and handed unlimited fines.
Operators will need to show they have tried to combat sexual harassment of workers by customers if they are to guard against the risk of compensation claims.
Pubs have been advised to put up warning notices telling punters that staff harassment will not be tolerated.
Now, I’m all for bartenders feeling comfortable behind the bar. And that includes not taking any crap from the clientele. But I’ve never known a pushover bartender–male or female. They’re a hearty bunch, able to dish it even better than they take it.
But all that banter will be in the past, laments Tony Payne of the Federation of Licensed Victuallers Association. “[T]here has been rapport in the past,” he says, “you just can’t have it anymore.”
Rapport? Dead? In pubs? In England? Bloody sad, innit?
I have one question for Women and Equalities Minister Harriet Harman, the arse behind the rules. Harriet, love, can I get you a clue?
Boston Set to Ban Trans Fats
Boston, a city known for (among other things) having a fat, know-it-all mayor who tells other people how to eat, is set to ban trans fats today.
Anne McHugh, project director for Boston Steps, a chronic disease prevention program at the Boston Public Health Commission, said banning trans fats will save lives.
“There’s very strong research showing that trans fat consumption is significantly related to increased heart disease risk,” McHugh said.
If approved today, businesses will have six months to eliminate oils and spreads that contain trans fats. Within a year, hospitals, schools and eateries will have to eliminate trans fats from baked goods and other products, McHugh said.
Anne McHugh knows what’s best for you. No, seriously. Here’s McHugh quoted earlier this year at Boston.com:
“There is no need to have artificial trans fat,” said Anne McHugh, project director of the health department’s Boston Steps program, which combats obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. “It’s just bad.”
And here’s McHugh quoted in CSNews.com:
“We’re working on many fronts to try and influence children’s eating behaviors,” Anne McHugh, director of the Boston Public Health Commission’s Boston Steps program, told the paper. “Sugary drinks are just empty calories without any nutritional value, and it’s an area where we think we can have influence.”
McHugh also analogized adults to “toddlers” in a Jamaica Plain Gazette piece last year.
Finally, here’s an early internal document (PDF) that shows how the well-funded Boston Steps is suffering from a bad case of mission creep.
Amy Winehouse Stamps Out Cigarette on Own Face at Restaurant
I’m totally canceling my dinner reservations with Amy Winehouse, who apparently used her face to stamp out a cigarette last week, The Sun reports.
The gross piece of self-harming came in front of stunned diners in a London restaurant.
The troubled star was with pals when she was asked THREE TIMES by staff to put out her Marlboro Light because of the smoking ban.
As she received her final warning, Amy stared straight into the waitress’s eyes and pushed the burning tip of the fag into her own face.
A source at the diner said: “She hardly flinched because she was so high. The whole place was open-mouthed in horror.”
Nice! Crispy previously noted Ms. Winehouse’s sprint for McNuggets sauce here.
That’s Captain Ahab, Dude
Want to reduce your carbon footprint? Of course you do. It’s the latest craze, and you’re all about the latest craze. In that case, reports a new study touted by the pro-whaling Norwegian group High Northern Alliance, it’s time you booked your ticket on the low-carbon, whale-meat express!
“People can eat whale meat with a good conscious (sic),” says Rune Frovik of the High North Alliance, which has conducted the study.
The study compared the carbon foot print of Norwegian minke whale meat and farm raised meat. It found that the carbon foot print of beef was eight times higher than that of whale meat. “Put simply, one meal of beef emits the same amount of greenhouse gases as eight meals of whale meat,” says Frovik.
When expressing greenhouse gas emissions as CO2 equivalents, whale meat ends up with 1.9 kg per CO2 equivalents while the corresponding values are 17.4 for lamb, 15.8 for beef, 6.4 for pork and 4.6 for chicken.
The CO2 equivalents for other types of meat were done through other studies.
The High North Alliance has for years argued that abundant whale stocks make whale meat a sustainable and ecological sound option. International scientists estimate that there are more than 100,000 minke whales in the areas where the Norwegian commercial whale hunt takes place.
“Now it is also confirmed that whale meat is low carbon and good for the climate,” Frovik says.
Reuters has more. Crispy covered all things whalicious — from whale recipes to Hayden Panetierre to Fudgie the Whale — here.
Post title reference hails from here.
Why Does the Whopper Hate our Freedom?
Abominable fat-suit king John Banzhaf has some serious competition, in the form of Lawrence Gostin, who teaches law just up the road from where Banzhaf does the same. Gostin says we worry way too much, and so gives us… another thing to worry about.
“Ever since September 11, we’ve been lurching from one crisis to the next, which has really frightened the public,” Gostin told AFP later.
“While we’ve been focusing so much attention on that, we’ve had this silent epidemic of obesity that’s killing millions of people around the world, and we’re devoting very little attention to it and a negligible amount of money.”
The excellent Center for Consumer Freedom takes Gostin to task. And in spite of his Osama bin Whopper headline, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran gets it, too.
If you generally eat healthy but make only an occasional trip to fast-food joints, the only junk-food related dangers you’ll face will happen when your friend gashes you with a samurai sword at BK.
Israeli Government Looks to Deport Asian Chefs
The first victim of xenophobia is the people who directly suffer its consequences. The second victim is a nation’s cuisine. Immigrants are always found in a free nation’s kitchens, and they’re usually doing the bulk of the good cooking. Which is why an Israeli government plan to enforce a protectionist, anti-immigrant law specifically aimed at Asian chefs in Israel is sure to hurt both immigrants and diners.
Israel’s nationwide sushi craze is being endangered by a wasabi-strength threat: The government, seeking to protect local jobs, wants to send all foreign-born Asian chefs packing by January 2009.
Asian food has become increasingly popular in Israel, fueled by the large number of young Israelis who travel to the region in an unofficial rite of passage after compulsory army service.
Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Indian restaurants have grown into a $280 million industry, accounting for 10 percent of the local dining landscape, according to the Ethnic Restaurant Association.
For the moment, Asian restaurants employ 900 foreign chefs and kitchen workers. But if the government has its way, that number could soon drop.
“We feel an Israeli can hold a wok as well as a Thai or a Chinese person,” said Shoshana Strauss, a lawyer at the Industry and Trade Ministry, which regulates work permits for foreign workers.
Restaurant operators said the Israeli plan posed an existential threat to their thriving businesses, saying the foreigners have expertise that cannot easily be replaced.
“If we don’t have cooks, we don’t have food. If we don’t have food, we don’t have customers,” said Steven Lobel, a sushi operator who owns two Asian restaurants that employ 14 Asian kitchen workers in the Tel Aviv area. “It’s pretty much one of the biggest threats we have as restaurant operators.”
What an outrage. I’m with Lobel, obviously. If there’s any justice in the world, Israel will cut out this xenophobic crap and put Strauss on the first plane to Bangkok, where I’m sure she’ll find that Thai chefs can’t make just as good a matzoh ball soup as she could find back home.
Coincidentally, tonight is gay Jewish sushi night in Philly.
A (Bacon) Tale of Two Cities
If the medianoche (the Cuban sandwich featuring ham and pork) got into the turducken (the Russian doll-ish turkey stuffed with duck that’s stuffed with chicken) in the same way your chocolate got in my peanut butter, the result might be the bacon-wrapped hot dog. It’s big in S.F., says YumSugar:
Whenever I find myself drunk and hungry in San Francisco’s Mission District, I hurry over to the stand selling hot dogs wrapped in bacon. According to my sister, this delicious hot dog — topped with caramelized onions, mustard, and ketchup with a grilled jalapeño on the side — is a specialty of Mexico. Wherever it’s from, it’s pure porky heaven.
It’s popular down the coast in L.A., too, though it’s under attack by the food police there to the point where selling it can get you arrested:
Not quite Mexican and not quite American, the bacon-wrapped hot dog, like the city that so fervently embraces it, has a curious romance about it. You can smell one from blocks away. The grilled bacon, twisted around a wiener, is topped with grilled onions and a mountaintop of diced tomatoes, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. Then one whole grilled green poblano chile is plopped impossibly on top. You take a bite and think, This is so good, no wonder it’s illegal!
Among working-class downtown shoppers, belligerent clubgoers and adventurous foodies, devotion to the famed “heart-attack dogs” is strong and strident, a source of raw L.A. nostalgia.
“I probably saw my first one while I was trying to pick up 18-year-old girls at Florentine Gardens,” says Eddie Lin, a food blogger at deependdining.com, who has rhapsodized about the bacon-wrapped dogs on local public radio.
To get them, “I go to places like the 99 Cents Only store in Reseda or other Hispanic working-class neighborhoods in the Valley. Parks are good too. It’s the only street food L.A. can really claim as its own,” Lin adds. “It’s illegal and yet it’s a ubiquitous part of L.A. culture.”
So you can imagine the frustration of vendors like Palacios, caught between the demands of the market and the demands of the law.
She would love to sell bacon-wrapped hot dogs — trust her — but a trip last year to the women’s county jail, a trip she says officials orchestrated to “make an example” of her, finally pushed her to give up the bacon and illegal grilling device she used for so long. Instead, she prepares dogs the only way the county Environmental Health Department currently allows, by boiling or steaming. Not grilling. And grilling is the only way to make a classic L.A. bacon-wrapped hot dog.
More the LA Weekly.
When it Comes to Kids and Ads, Fast Food Companies Can’t Win
Companies advertising in Canada have voluntarily agreed not to show unhealthy foods in ads targeting kids. If that sounds voluntary and fine enough it’s because it is. Naturally, not everyone is happy, led by so-called health advocates.
Elizabeth Frank, a dietitian in Lunenburg, N.S., looked over the company commitments and welcomed the initiative.
“With the amount of time children spend watching TV and the misinformation there is in there, I think it’s about time they started to concentrate on good nutrition,” she said.
In the case of McDonald’s, the company said its advertised meal aimed at children under 12 will contain no more than 600 calories, no more than 35 per cent of calories from fat, 10 per cent from saturated fat and 25 per cent total sugar by weight.
Its advertised meal for kids under 12 will either be four-piece McNuggets with apple slices, caramel dip and one per cent milk; or a hamburger meal with the apples and milk.
[…]
Frank said some of the amounts are still “pretty high” in the McDonald’s meal.
“The amount of fat and sugar could be lower, as far as I’m concerned,” she said.
“And 600 calories for a 12-year-old child … that’s a lot of calories in one meal. That would be more than they would get, say, if your mother made you a sandwich, and gave you an apple and milk to take to school. You wouldn’t get as many calories, and you would get a healthier meal of it.”
Skim milk and apples your mom gives you have less calories than the same stuff at McDonald’s? Really? On the other hand, does it take a dietician to conclude that fast food is generally not as healthy as what mom packs in a lunchpail? Uncanny, that Ms. Frank is.
Fat foes are like any other nannies — give them a voluntary inch and they’ll grunt and moan until some asinine legislator takes up their cause.
More here from the Canadian Press.
Note: Blogged from the bar at RFD.
Greatest. Nonsense. Food. Rant. Ever.
Danny Katz, columnist with Australia’s The Age, has a suggestion or two for the new Oz PM. Except for the whole bit about getting troops out of Iraq, the rest is utter nonsense — and sheer brilliance.
Snacking in cinemas? BAN IT. All that disgusting Slurpee-suckling and Choc-top-chomping - close your eyes and it’s like listening to the soundtrack from the climactic courtroom orgy scene in Creamer vs Creamer. And those popcorn-eaters: it’s impossible to follow a movie-plot when you’re sitting beside someone with a Jayco-sized popcorn-tub, their arm dipping in and out all the way through the film, digging up every last layer of popcorn sediment like the draghead on a Dutch dredger.
Picnics in parks? Ban it. There is nothing romantic or relaxing about balancing on the nobbles of your knees, perched in a patch of man-eating bindies, while you feast on a resort-style buffet of fetid-fetta, sun-dried-out dips, cracked-up crackers, then afterwards lying down and savouring the delicate aroma of a dozen varieties of market-fresh dog turd.
But above all others, there is one ultimate non-eating venue where people will continue to eat: it incorporates the painfulness of bed-breakfasting, the distractedness of cinema-snacking, and the outdoorness of park-picnicking … and I’m talking about theatrical productions in public parks. Because I went to see Romeo and Juliet in the Botanic Gardens last weekend, and it was a good show; it was a fun night out - but it’s not so easy understanding complex Shakespearean drama while sitting in the dark, on the side of a hill, trying to open a tub of sloppy tzatziki.
Fantastic — even more so when I consider than an actual major newspaper published it. Whole thing here. I’m almost certain he cribbed this from a Best of Craigslist post, but that doesn’t make Katz’s piece any less awesome.
English Censors Ban Singing-Kids Voices from Egg Ad
The nanny state may be creeping forward in the U.S., but it’s positively at full gallop in England. The country’s censors have banned the singing voices of children from an egg ad because eggs… well, because “most children would not be interested in” eating omega-3 eggs.
An egg advert that uses children’s voices has been banned by the advertising watchdog
The move comes just six months after a re-run of the “Go to work on an egg” campaign, fronted by Tony Hancock, was barred from the air waves.
This time, the children’s song, “Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, lay a little egg for me”, has incurred the wrath of the advertising watchdog.
An egg company planned to use the tune, sung by 10-year-olds, to promote its omega 3 eggs.
More from the Telegraph. As Megnut and anyone else growing up in Massachusetts during the 1980s (including me) knows, brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh.
Mississippi Pols: We Don’t Serve Your Kind Here
If your kind is obese, that is:
Mississippi legislators this week introduced a bill that would make it illegal for state-licensed restaurants to serve obese patrons. Bill No. 282, a copy of which you’ll find below, is the brainchild of three members of the state’s House of Representatives, Republicans W. T. Mayhall, Jr. and John Read, and Democrat Bobby Shows. The bill, which is likely dead on arrival, proposes that the state’s Department of Health establish weight criteria after consultation with Mississippi’s Council on Obesity. It does not detail what penalties an eatery would face if its grub was served to someone with an excessive body mass index.
Via The Smoking Gun, which also features a copy of the bill.
A Helping of Salt with Pork-Barrel Spending
Despite the fact that research — now more than decade old — shows that the alleged health detriment of salt is overblown, England’s government is buying up bacon sandwiches — known as butties or sarnies — so it can sound the alarm about how much salt they contain.
[T]rading standard inspectors… discovered customers at certain roadside vans in York were eating more than their entire daily quota of salt by munching through just one bacon sarnie.
The shock revelation was made during a survey of salt levels in the bacon and sausage sandwiches sold in catering vans across Yorkshire.
[…]
Professor Graham MacGregor, of the campaign group Consensus Action on Salt and Health, said: “This research demonstrates just how much salt may be lurking in take-away foods.”
More on that here. MacGregor’s group is pushing a Salt Awareness Week — coincidentally running right now! Ignore them, and take this literally sound advice on building a better bacon buttie. (”Sound” like on the decibel level , as the bacon should reach when you crunch into it.)
