At Grist, Erik Hoffner grabs Q & A time with Patrick Martins, the guy who founded Slow Food USA in 2000, then left it to open Heritage Foods. Martins says what those of us once known to have left The Omnivore's Dilemma on the nightstand or back of the toilet tank semi-permanently, where we could absorb its lessons at leisure, key among them that we won't have truly clean meat until we develop a network of regional slaughterhouses near urban centers. Martins:
Investors in this country have failed to take the plunge and invest in slaughterhouses. They've been considered "risky" investments. I think part of this is the effect the vegetarian movement still has on us ― and PETA. What is sad is that while no investments are made, and while PETA and Paul McCartney expand their discourse, billions of animals are suffering at major slaughter factories. We are offering no alternative, while meekly avoiding the issue that Americans eat tons of meat a day. We eat it, so we have to deal with the issue. While major crimes against God's creatures are being committed, we are standing by because the solution is "too complicated."
average is about 50 percent."
Case in point: Mission Street Food founder Anthony Myint, whose successful Kickstarter campaign SFoodie chronicled ― the $12,000 he raised (repayable via gift certificates once the restaurant opens) wasn't nearly enough to renovate the space he leased, but it let bigger-bucks lenders know how eager San Franciscans were to support him. In May, Little City Gardens raised even more ― $20,000 ― and both Dessert Labs and Bacon Camp overshot more modest goals. (Not all of the microlending has taken place online. Todd Spitzer finally, officially opened Remedy Oakland in Temescal this week; he raised thousands of dollars to finish the construction on his space by offering customers a prepayment plan.)
So who's next? SFoodie pored over Kickstarter and Indiegogo looking for local projects. We found a few:
Bourdain will be signing copies of Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (Ecco, $26.99). In the book, he takes aim at St. Alice Waters: "However quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings. And organic school lunches might be more important to you than crime in the streets in Berkeley ― but in the underfunded school systems of West Baltimore, I suspect, they feel differently. A healthy lunch is all fine and good ― but no use at all to Little Timmy if he gets shot to death on the way to school." Ouch.
"I work with the available ingredients here, but the flavors are traditional. Here [in the States], Caribbean food runs into stereotypes
of what it should be. We share a lot of common ingredients with South American food, Thai food, and Hawaiian food,
so I'm sourcing food from some of these vendors.
So, kinda bored, I started reading the tags on each bottle, which translated the Japanese sake names into English. From this I learned two things: 1) That the folks who named these sakes had a few bottles in them before going to work that day; and 2), that sakes have amazingly colorful names. So colorful that, were I looking to name a band, I might steal or take very deep inspiration from them. Here are a few sake names that caught my eye, along with what kind of band should have that name and what sort of wine it (the sake, not the band) tastes like:
Sake name: "Demon Slayer" (Watake Onikoroshi)
Tastes like: White Burgundy or Merlot
Band genres: Death metal, Christian metal, or really any kind of metal
A film will be screened outdoors at sunset, and Soul Cocina is looking for suggestions as to which one it will be; current possibilities include Tampopo, Kebab Connection, and The Big Night, but people can add new titles to the list. Donations will be collected and given to the SF Food Bank on the night. Check out the current list of participating businesses and vendors after the jump.
