Scrapin’ Up the Bits, Lots of ‘Em

While I work on a longer, more “serious” post about nutrition and disease, there’s been a heck of a lot of interesting news and things happening.

Perhaps the most uninteresting of these was the arrival today of my Zuni Café Cookbook. After the wild success of the roasted whole branzino, it just seemed like fate was telling me to crack that thing open as soon as possible. My plan is to make at least one main course from it a week for the next month or so and report on the outcome.

From cookbooks we move to much more intriguing fare, such as the FDA’s approval of cloned animals as a source of beef and pork and milk. I swear on whatever holy text can be provided that I am not anti-technology, but this really is unnerving.

There are no long-term data on whether meat from cloned animals is safe, and the government has no plans to track the products from these animals once they enter the marketplace or to label them as coming from a cloned animal. In any case, for those interested, the Ethicurean’s cloned animals digest is very informative.

I’ve read about overfishing, but did you know that the price of cod – the fish of choice for fish ‘n chips – in the UK has quadrupled in the last few years because cod stocks have been so depleted? And that these huge Chinese-owned fisheries are doing their best to devastate the fish stocks in the waters off of Africa? The NY Times has the scoop… or should I say “catch”?

We use garden-variety fresh mozzarella on our pizzas. But true Neapolitan-style pizzas, particularly those made in Naples, only use mozzarella di bufala, and it’s apparently about to get more expensive because of problems with bacterial infections in Italian buffalo herds.

The Daily Table blog has an interesting post about water, both its scarcity and its health, and how local, family-owned farms are important to both.

Want to find food that’s in season and local? The National Resources Defense Council has a fantastic resource for you.