Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  When I told friends back East about the craze for fancy toast that was sweeping across the Bay Area, they laughed and laughed. (How silly; how twee; how San Francisco.) But my bet is that artisanal toast is going national. I’ve already heard reports of sightings in the West Village.

  If the spread of toast is a social contagion, then Carrelli was its perfect vector. Most of us dedicate the bulk of our attention to a handful of relationships: with a significant other, children, parents, a few close friends. Social scientists call these “strong ties.” But Carrelli can’t rely on such a small set of intimates. Strong ties have a history of failing her, of buckling under the weight of her illness. So she has adapted by forming as many relationships—as many weak ties—as she possibly can. And webs of weak ties are what allow ideas to spread.

  In a city whose economy is increasingly built on digital social networks—but where simple eye contact is at a premium—Giulietta Carrelli’s latticework of small connections is old-fashioned and analog. It is built not for self-presentation, but for self-preservation. And the spread of toast is only one of the things that has arisen from it.

  A few weeks ago, I went back to Trouble because I hadn’t yet built my own damn house. When my coconut came, the next guy at the bar shot me a sideways glance. Sitting there with a slice of toast and a large tropical fruit, I felt momentarily self-conscious. Then the guy said to the barista, “Hey, can I get a coconut too?” and the two of us struck up a conversation.

  FIVE THINGS I WILL NOT EAT

  By Barry Estabrook

  From CivilEats.com

  Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook has written for The Atlantic, Gastronomica, the late great Gourmet magazine, and his blog Politics Of ThePlate.com. His 2011 book Tomatoland made readers think differently about supermarket tomatoes; here are a few more eye-openers he’s discovered.

  My partner eyed me sternly when I announced that my next book was going to be an investigative look at pork production. “Does this mean that I’ll have to give up eating bacon?” she asked.

  Deadly outbreaks of E. coli and Salmonella in spinach and cantaloupes, antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” connected to pork and chicken production, potent drugs that are banned in the United States in imported shrimp and catfish: Nothing has the potential to destroy your appetite quite as thoroughly as writing about industrial food production or living with someone who does. Somehow, I have remained omnivorous, more or less. But there are only five things that I absolutely refuse to eat.

  1. Supermarket Ground Beef

  I lost my appetite for prepared ground beef in the late 1980s, when a friend’s three-year-old daughter died after eating a hamburger tainted with E. coli O157:H7, which lives in the intestines of healthy cattle and other animals, but can be found in water, food, soil, or on surfaces that have been contaminated with animal or human feces. She endured a painful, lingering death, beginning with a tummy ache, and over two weeks progressing to bloody diarrhea, convulsions, and seizures as the E. coli bacteria destroyed her kidneys.

  It’s true that E. coli dies when hamburger is cooked to at least 160 degrees, by which point it is well-done. But even if you like dry, gray patties (I don’t), why take the risk? Every time you buy a package of supermarket ground beef, you’re playing culinary Russian roulette. E. coli comes from meat that has been contaminated with manure. A few E. coli cells can multiply into millions in a short time. Slaughterhouse scraps that go into ground beef come from the outside and undersides of carcasses, the areas most likely to come in contact with the hide and most prone to fecal contamination. Those parts can travel from several slaughterhouses to one facility to be ground and packaged.

  In his Pulitzer Prize–winning article describing how a Minnesota woman was left paralyzed after eating E. coli–tainted hamburger, New York Times’ Michael Moss reported that the meat in the single prepared, frozen patty she ate had been shipped to a Wisconsin processor from facilities in Nebraska, Texas, South Dakota, and Uruguay.

  The easiest way to avoid supermarket hamburger is to buy a whole cut like a chuck steak or sirloin and grind it yourself. A few pulses from a food processor does the trick nicely, if you don’t own a meat grinder. Or have a butcher grind it for you while you wait. You can also buy from a small producer. When I went to pick up my beef order last fall, the owner of the custom slaughterhouse was standing beside a stainless steel table holding a mountain of ground beef waiting for her to pack it into one-pound bags. “I can tell you exactly how many animals this hamburger came from,” she said. “One.”

  2. Salad Greens in Plastic Bags or Clam-Shell Boxes

  For starters, salad fixings bought whole and chopped in your kitchen are more nutritious than those from containers. Bagged and boxed greens are in for the long haul, and can stay “fresh” for as long as 17 days. But vegetables begin losing nutrients the second they are picked. Within eight hours, 10 percent of Vitamin C and between three and four percent of beta-carotene are gone. Chopping and shredding increase oxidation, driving out more nutrients. Even short stretches of time at room temperatures further lower nutrient levels.

  Packaged greens are also vulnerable to bacterial contamination. In packing houses, crops from many fields are washed in the same water, which allows bacteria from one field to spread to greens from clean fields. E. coli and other bacteria can hide in cut edges, safe from wash water. Allowed to become warm for even a short time, the containers become perfect incubators for bacteria. The result is that bagged greens have sickened or killed consumers in dozens of outbreaks over the last several years.

  In a 2010 investigation, Consumer Reports found that bags and containers of greens contained levels of coliform bacteria (which doesn’t make you sick, but is a sign of unsanitary handling) that were 39 percent higher than what is considered acceptable.

  Avoiding packaged greens is simple: Buy whole heads or bunches and chop them yourself. While working on an article for the New York Times Magazine in 2011, I bought a head of romaine lettuce, rinsed the leaves individually, and chopped them. It took me two minutes and 53 seconds. As a bonus, I saved myself 80 cents.

  3. Bluefin Tuna

  Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean populations of Bluefin tuna are severely overfished. In the Atlantic, the species hovers on the brink of extinction. Some scientists say that it may have already passed the point of no return. In the Pacific, the population has been decimated by 96 percent. I liken eating bluefins to eating Bengal tigers. Both are beautiful, sleek predators. Bluefins can swim 60 miles per hour, dive to 4,000 feet, and migrate across oceans. Someone alive today could be the person who eats the last bluefin. I don’t want it to be me.

  International organizations that are charged with setting catch limits for bluefins regularly set quotas far above what their own scientists recommend. And there has been a thriving market in illegally caught fish. If that’s not enough to put you off Bluefin, be warned, their flesh is extremely high in mercury.

  4. Out-of-Season Tomatoes

  The first question is, why would you want to eat an out-of-season tomato? Most of the hard, pale orbs are pithy and tasteless, at best. Compared to their local, in-season cousins, they are bereft of nutrients. And varieties that do have a glimmer of tomato flavor are outrageously expensive.

  But the real problem with winter tomatoes is the abuses suffered by the farmworkers who harvest them. These men and women in the tomato fields are underpaid, ill-housed, and often sprayed with toxic pesticides. Abject slavery is not uncommon. (I care so much about this topic that I wrote a book about it.)

  In recent years, working conditions in Florida, the source of most American-grown winter tomatoes, have improved dramatically. New varieties have been developed that actually taste tomato-y, and most Florida growers have signed onto a Fair Food Program that guarantees workers some basic labor rights and provides them with a one-penny-a-pound raise (it doesn’t sound like much but it’s the difference between $50 and $80 a day).

  However
that’s only if—and it’s a big if—the end buyer of the tomatoes signs onto the program as well and agrees to pay that extra penny directly to the workers. So far, most fast-food and food-service companies have come aboard. But aside from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market, not a single supermarket chain has signed on. Until they do, they won’t get my business.

  5. Farmed Salmon

  A salmon farm, even a so-called organic one in Scottish waters, is nothing short of a floating feedlot. Excrement, uneaten food, and dead fish fall into the ocean, along with a witch’s brew of drugs and disease organisms that can kill wild salmon unlucky enough to swim in the vicinity of a farm’s net pens. Farmed salmon are susceptible to infectious salmon anaemia, aquaculture’s answer to highly contagious hoof-and-mouth disease. The “cure” is to eradicate entire farmed Stocks consisting of millions of fish. Captive salmon also spread sea lice to wild fish. The parasites feed on the mucous, blood, and skin and can kill young salmon.

  Farmed salmon is also potentially harmful to humans who eat it. Studies have shown that farmed salmon contains significantly higher levels of chemicals known to cause everything from neurological damage to cancer than wild salmon.

  As a way to produce protein, farming salmon is illogical. Although feed formulas have improved over the years, salmon still have to eat more pounds of fishmeal and oil than they put on as meat. That meal they are fed comes from stocks of small sardine-like fish that are already caught at maximum sustainable levels. It’s far better to raise fish like tilapia that can be fed a vegetarian diet. But that’s not where the money is.

  Fortunately, there is a good alternative to farmed salmon. Wild salmon from Alaska is sustainable and its taste will remind you why you wanted to eat salmon in the first place.

  So what about my partner? Will she feel obligated to forsake bacon? My pork research is still in the early stages, so I don’t have a final answer. But at very least, it’s looking like we’re going to want to become very selective about what goes in our frying pan.

  BACONOMICS 101

  By David Sax

  From The Tastemakers

  In his 2009 book Save the Deli, Canadian journalist David Sax rhapsodized about great Jewish delicatessens. His new book The Tastemakers digs deep into the nature of food fads, as Sax lays bare the sneaky cultural forces that make us crave certain dishes (remember cupcakes?) for a season.

  When my taxi pulled up to the University of Illinois at Chicago Forum on the cold Saturday morning I flew in from DC, a crowd of several dozen people were already milling about outside, cradling coffees in their hands as they formed the start of a line. From a nearby tent the deli meat company Eckrich was handing out slices of five different delicatessen meats that had been infused with bacon. A banner proclaimed this “The Best Idea Ever,” and they were scarcely able to open the packages quick enough for the hungry crowd that rushed to devour them. Inside the doors of the building several dozen volunteers were lined up behind long registration tables, ready to process the thousands who would soon arrive, ravenous and ramped up for greasy delights at the sold-out event called Baconfest.

  The sprawling twenty-two-thousand–square foot floor of the Forum’s event hall was abuzz with activity. Six long tables, each stretching the length of the room, had been taken over by eighty-two local restaurants and bars, beer and liquor companies, and other vendors. Another eighty waiters and bartenders, working for the catering company Sodexo, wandered like lost children in black shirts while chefs, cooks, bakers, and owners scrambled to get ready. Pallets of beer kegs were being pushed around to all corners of the room, as James Brown played over the sound system. Along the back wall a giant screen was flashing the Baconfest logo: Chicago’s sky blue–and-white flag with red stars, rendered to look like a strip of bacon. Everywhere I looked people were carrying in trays, casseroles, Tupperware containers, and pulling huge hand carts piled with mountains of cooked bacon. Michael Griggs, one of the founders and organizers of Baconfest, now in its fifth year, was busy running around with a walkie-talkie, trying to corral the activity into some semblance of order.

  “Hey,” said one of the chefs from the restaurant Belly-Q, who literally stepped in front of Griggs’s path to get his attention, “we have a fryer going. Can we leave the hot oil in or take it with us?”

  “Take it with you,” said Griggs over his shoulder as he blew past the chef and kept moving on to the next issue.

  One by one the restaurants turned on their portable griddles and ovens, reheating their bacon creations, which ranged from simple candied strips of bacon to concoctions like bacon-spiked bloody Marys, bacon peanut butter macarons, bacon cupcakes, bacon pineapple donuts, bacon pizzas, bacon biscotti, chicken-fried bacon, bacon meatballs, and bacon cotton candy, to name just a few. Puffs of bacon vapor were visibly rising into the air, settling down a few minutes later as a fine mist of aerosolized bacon grease that clung to every possible surface. In the corner of the hall a chef from one of the restaurants walked up to a table run by Jones Dairy Farm, one of the few dedicated bacon producers attending Baconfest. They had hung a whole slab of bacon, several feet long, from a rack next to their table, while a glistening warm pork belly rested on a carving board, lit up by a heat lamp like a Broadway diva. “Look at how beautiful this is,” said the chef, who was tapping his fingertips together rhythmically like Mr. Burns plotting something diabolical. “I’m like a moth to a flame. Or a fat guy to a slab of bacon.”

  At 11:30 the doors opened to 150 advance guests. These VIPs had paid $200 each for tickets that allowed them to enter an hour earlier than the rest of the 1,500 Baconfest attendees (whose general admission tickets still cost $100 each). All of the event’s three thousand–odd tickets, for both the lunch session and the dinner session (identical format, but with different restaurants) had sold out months before, in just forty-one minutes, and others had paid even more for scalpers’ tickets. The VIPs quickly fanned out with their Baconfest program guides in hand, heading to the tables that most interested them. There were families in newly purchased Baconfest T-shirts (including one portraying the Blues Brothers as flying pigs), wealthy well-dressed couples, hardcore foodies with expensive DSLR cameras, and a lot of burly men in Chicago Blackhawks jerseys. I walked outside and looked at the general admission line, which now stretched all the way around the corner and down two full blocks. Inside Griggs gave the signal over his radio to unlock the doors, and when they were flung open a cheer went up from the line. One man shouted “BACON!” at the top of his lungs like a general leading the cavalry charge.

  “Oh my god,” a woman said as she came into the hall and saw its sheer scope.

  “Where’s the bacon?” asked another man in a panic, making a beeline to the nearest restaurant’s table, where he encountered the Signature Room’s smoked bacon bread pudding, with pork tenderloin stuffed with chorizo and wrapped in bacon and topped in bacon-braised red cabbage and a bacon ancho sauce. He ate it in a single bite, then packed away another.

  Some people entered the room and bolted to a particular booth, while others just froze for a minute, drunk with excitement at the overwhelming sight of so much bacon. Two men stood at the entrance and slow clapped. Nearby a police officer turned to his partner and said, “If this crowd gets out of hand, we may have to use bacon spray instead of pepper spray.”

  Walking around the festival during the lunch session I got a firsthand taste of how the cultural momentum of the bacon trend translated into economic opportunity.

  At the Jones Dairy Farm table I spoke with Doug McDonald, the sales manager in charge of the company’s foodservice accounts. “Bacon is our fastest-growing category. The past five years we’ve seen double-digit growth in food service sales. What you see now is bacon going from retail and pancake houses to mainstream bar and grills serving bacon during happy hour,” he said. “There’s a restaurant in Arizona called Fifty/Fifty that we sell to. They take our thick-cut bacon, cook it, and put it on the bar in brandy glasses like peanuts.”


  At the other end of the hall Bob Nueske, the second-generation owner of Wisconsin’s Nueske’s, one of the largest independent bacon smokehouses in the country, looked out at the wild, ravenous crowd with wonder. “I always have a fear that trends are like hula hoops,” Nueske, who is broad and tall, with a mobster’s wall of coiffed hair, told me as strips of the company’s applewood smoked bacon slowly sizzled on an electric griddle. “This bacon thing is beyond a trend. Thirty years ago I couldn’t imagine kids making bacon like they are now.”

  Dave Miller, the owner of Bang Bang! Pie Shop, a Chicago bakery, was handing out bacon cherry rugelach, a traditional Jewish cookie rendered as unkosher as possible. “I see bacon as outdated,” admitted Miller, “but it’s a money maker and we do it because the economics demand it. It creates a cult following.” The bakery sold strips of candied bacon at a dollar a piece, and these acted as a sort of honey trap for bacon lovers, who came to Bang Bang! for the bacon but invariably bought a loaf of bread or some other item.

  Bacon’s economic power was a shock even to those who built businesses around it. Sven Lindén was the founder of Black Rock Spirits, which made Bakon Vodka, a bacon-infused vodka that debuted in 2007 as a joke. It now does over $1 million in wholesale sales each year. “We knew there was a novelty component,” Lindén told me as we stood by his booth, where they were handing out bacon bloody Marys, “but even in states where we’ve been around for five years they’ll have a small bar do seven thousand bacon Bloody Marys a year.” One of the few vendors not selling food but doing brisk business was Rebecca Wood, who owned the gift boutique Enjoy: An Urban Novelty Store, which had an entire bacon section filled with over a hundred novelty products. When she opened the store in 2005 her top-selling item quickly became bacon strip bandages, and today it remained in the top spot, followed by bacon socks, and I Love You More Than Bacon signs, which sold like gangbusters online.