"[Just] up the hill from an abandoned schoolhouse in the rolling hills of
west central Wisconsin about 33 miles southeast of Eau Claire, 3,000 to
4,000 pounds of salmon are harvested each week and 1.5 million pounds of
leafy greens each year. And it’s all being sold to grocers, restaurants
and wholesalers within a 400-mile radius of Jackson County...
A 3-acre greenhouse, nearly twice the length of a football field,
glows purple from its more than 1,100 LED grow lights — a sight that
turns the heads of passing motorists on Interstate 94 at night. The
lights, with cloud-based software, help mimic California’s Salinas
Valley.
Next
door, the North Atlantic Ocean is replicated in a one-acre fish house.
Thousands of Atlantic salmon, some newly hatched from eggs sourced in
Iceland, others nearly 10 pounds after two years, are raised in
22,000-gallon tanks filled with fresh water drawn from a 180-foot-deep
well...
With millions of dollars in financial backing from Todd Wanek, the CEO
of Ashley Furniture, and his wife, Karen, this is where a team of
experts schooled in the minutiae of aquaculture and hydroponics uses
water from the fish rearing process to grow vegetables year round on
floating mats. It’s all certified organic with no pesticides, growth
hormones or other additives."
"Aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics. Water in
which fish are raised is then used to fill greenhouse tanks to grow
plants. The fish waste provides nutrients for the plants, and the water
recirculates between the tanks...
Salmon are raised in water that is about 39 degrees. The nutrient-rich
water is then pumped to the neighboring greenhouse where the water is
allowed to warm naturally to around 75 degrees and can be used to grow
baby red leaf lettuce from seed to harvest in 18 to 24 days...
Like hydroponics, aquaponics
systems require less land and water than conventional crop production
methods, increase growth rates and allow for year-round production... The projects, which use no surface water and emphasize cleanliness
including bio-security measures to prevent contamination of crops, are
designed to decrease transportation costs and provide locally sourced
food...
The Superior Fresh system, which includes about 850,000 gallons of water
in the greenhouse, has interior and exterior weather stations that talk
to each other and open and close roof vents to help regulate
temperatures. On a recent day, with temperatures outside in the mid-20s,
the greenhouse temperature was 76 degrees. During the polar vortex,
interior temperatures dropped to the upper 50s..."
I suppose everyone has certain restaurants or certain restaurant meals that are forever embedded in their memory. I'll never forget the Marine Room near San Diego, with its plate glass windows facing west over the Pacific, only a stone's throw from the high-tide mark (I believe it was later heavily damaged by an intense storm). For decades I have skipped my free breakfast in hotels in order to visit the Outdoorsman Cafe in Walker Minnesota, to have their hash browns and egg breakfast. And the "earlybird" cheap lobster dinners at the West Street Cafe near Acadia National Park were unforgettable (the restaurant now apparently having gone upscale and moved downtown to the tourist area).
But my earliest restaurant memories go back just over 50 years to the spring of 1968 when I had the opportunity to have dinner at Durgin-Park. IIRC, we took the MTA to Haymarket, then walked past open market stalls selling fish and flowers, then up some stairs to a noisy room where we were seated at a long table next to people we didn't know and served superb food that even a college student could afford.
Durgin-Park, a Faneuil Hall staple since 1827, will be closing on January 12. Employees of the historic restaurant were notified about the decision to close Wednesday. Durgin-Park
is one of the oldest restaurants in the country. It gained a reputation
for its good-hearted waitresses being nearly as “fresh” as its fish... Parent company Ark Restaurants based out of New York says it’s the
nature of the business – and that the restaurant just isn’t making money
like it used to.
And it seems kind of sleazy for the parent company to give longstanding employees only 10 days notice of closure.
Readers, feel free to leave suggestions on your memorable restaurants/meals in the comments section.
My grandparents, who had perhaps a dozen "milk cows" on their family farm, would have been awestruck to see the industrial-scale processes that are now involved. Even my mother, who milked those cows and took the milk cans to the local creamery, would find it hard to believe. The StarTribune offers some insight:
The milking carousel at the Louriston Dairy turns
22 hours a day and milks more cows in half an hour than most dairies do
all day.
Cows step onto the slow-moving
merry-go-round in single file. A worker sprays disinfectant on each
cow’s udder, another wipes the teats clean with a paper towel, and
another secures suction cups onto the teats for milking during a
seven-minute trip around the room. Gleaming silver tanks in the next
room fill with flash-cooled milk as 106 cows are milked at once.
The farm 18 miles west of Willmar
is home to 9,500 cows, 40 times larger than the average U.S. dairy
operation. It is part of a fast-growing network of giant farms built and
run by Riverview LLP, a Morris, Minn.-based firm that is a game-changer
for the Minnesota dairy industry. The company owns 92,000 milk cows —
more than all the farmers in Illinois or Virginia — and 60,000 of them
are in western Minnesota, where it has nine dairies and is building
more...
For 30 years, farms in the Upper Midwest have
gotten bigger and farmers who used to work a couple hundred acres now
work a couple thousand. In that time, new methods of raising livestock
emerged to take advantage of efficiencies of scale. Hogs, poultry and
beef cattle disappeared from fields and were moved into massive barns.
This upsizing has come more slowly
to dairy farming, but as the number of U.S. dairy farms shrinks, milk
production continues to rise. Amid low milk prices and a trade war
threatening exports, Riverview is placing massive bets: $50 million in
construction and startup costs for each new dairy...
This is a complicated matter, which I don't have the expertise to discuss or critique.
‘Natural wine’ advocates say everything about the modern industry is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong – and have triggered the biggest split in the wine world for a generation...
A recent study showed that 38% of wine lists in London now feature at
least one organic, biodynamic or natural wine (the categories can
overlap) – more than three times as many as in 2016. “Natural wines are
in vogue,” reported the Times last year. “The weird and wonderful
flavours will assault your senses with all sorts of wacky scents and
quirky flavours.”
As natural wine has grown, it has made enemies. To its many
detractors, it is a form of luddism, a sort of viticultural anti-vax
movement that lauds the cidery, vinegary faults that science has spent
the past century painstakingly eradicating. According to this view,
natural wine is a cult intent on rolling back progress in favour of wine
best suited to the tastes of Roman peasants. The Spectator has likened
it to “flawed cider or rotten sherry” and the Observer to “an acrid,
grim burst of acid that makes you want to cry”...
Once you know what to look for, natural wines are easy to spot: they
tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier, more acidic and generally truer
to the actual taste of grape than traditional wines. In a way, they
represent a return to the core elements that made human beings fall in
love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years ago...
The haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly
maddening to such traditionalists. “There is no legal definition of
natural wine,” Michel Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine
critics, told me. “It exists because it proclaims itself so. It is a
fantasy of marginal producers.” Robert Parker, perhaps the world’s most
powerful wine critic, has called natural wine an “undefined scam”...
..as natural wine advocates point out, the way most wine is produced today
looks nothing like this picture-postcard vision. Vineyards are soaked
with pesticide and fertiliser to protect the grapes, which are a
notoriously fragile crop...
The modern winemaker has access to a vast armamentarium of
interventions, from supercharged lab-grown yeast, to antimicrobials,
antioxidants, acidity regulators and filtering gelatins, all the way up
to industrial machines. Wine
is regularly passed through electrical fields to prevent calcium and
potassium crystals from forming, injected with various gases to aerate
or protect it, or split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis
and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio.
Natural winemakers believe that none of this is necessary...
Some quibble over which methods count as “natural,” from filtering to
machine-harvesting to vineyard architecture. (“I’m offended by vines on a
wire. It’s slavery,” a Spanish winemaker tells Lepeltier and Alice
Feiring in their book The Dirty Guide to Wine.)
Some use prehistoric winemaking methods, like subterranean fermentation
in clay amphorae. The semiotics of what counts as “natural,” and why,
and who gets to decide, can be a source of rancor... Whatever the process, the results can be downright funky: white wines
that can be amber, orange, and cloudy. Red wines that resemble fizzy
beet juice and occluded amethysts. The flavors can be intense and
unfamiliar — savory, salty, and startlingly sour. These wines flout the
conventions of connoisseurship, but among the city’s wine geeks and
sommeliers, natural wine has an intense following.
Justin Chearno, the wine director at the Four Horsemen, describes
himself as “really, really, really evangelical,” especially early in his
career. After Cork Dork author Bianca Bosker’s dismissal of “so-called natural wines” appeared last year in the New York Times, she says she received hate mail...
But enough shit-talking. Let’s talk manure. That horse-shit scent, politely called “barnyard,” is the product of Brettanomyces,
a bacterium present in many wines. Lepeltier, a partner at downtown
bistro Racines NY, explained: “It triggers some sexual stuff. And I’m
sure about that.” Lepeltier has a degree in philosophy and total
certainty in her opinions and taste. Like a musky perfume, barnyard
wines appeal to “something very, very primitive in us. So that’s one
reason [people like it]. And the second thing is: You can recognize it.”
As a recent feature in Fortune explained, “The French, perfecters of both making and consuming natural wine, have an onomatopoeic term for this, glou glou,
the sound these easy-drinking reds and whites make hurtling down your
throat on a warm June day.” This is wine designed to be gulped, not
sipped. Glou glou is both demonstratively and deceptively simple. A
visibly unfiltered wine shows off its maker’s rustic approach to
viniculture. But that is only possible when the wine is elaborate —
organic, biodynamic, location-specific, and labor-intensive.
The
glou glou aesthetic applies to more than wine. Glou glou is a
stripped-down renovation that showcases a building’s “bones.” It’s not
wearing makeup and looking great, because you’re well rested and have an
elaborate skin-care routine. (Natural wine, like natural beauty,
requires long-term commitment. Minimalism works best when it’s minimal
only on the surface.) Glou glou is passing a Polaroid camera around the
party (then arranging the Polaroids into an artful display and
photographing that with your iPhone). Glou glou is serving
caviar with potato chips, as they do at Brunette, a natural-wine bar run
by a married couple, designers who ditched New York City for the Hudson
Valley. The tabletops are unadorned marble. The walls are whitewashed
brick.
Glou
glou is a maddening form of luxury, one that simultaneously rejects and
performs elitism. Glou glou rejects the near past in favor of a
modernized version of the old past. This makes glou glou
incomprehensible to tastemakers from the near past — the ones who
abandoned whatever elements of the old past glou glou seeks to
resurrect. But here’s the worst part: Everyone who partakes in glou glou
knows this. Glou glou is self-conscious, self-aware, and self-critical.
Glou glou is how millennials do snob.
Like all trends associated with millennials, glou glou boils down to economics...
Lots more at the links, both of which are longreads. None of this matters to TYWKIWDBI; we are perfectly content swilling an occasional bottle of cheap pinot grigio. My initial impetus for blogging this topic was the photo of that awesome piece of farm equipment at the top.
Madison, Wisconsin is an urban island in a sea of farmland in southern
Wisconsin, so it's not surprising that there are probably 12-15 farmers'
markets scattered through the city and suburbs.
The one closest to home is within walking distance, between our house and the local library. The participants are mostly local farmers, but also bakers, beekeepers, cheesemakers, and other specialists.
There's no better place to get fresh food.
Tomorrow I'll be heading out to my favorite local farm to get the season's first sweet corn.
blindekuh restaurants in Basel and Zürich serve patrons in the dark.
blindekuh is one of the largest private-sector employers for
people with impaired vision. In our restaurants and through our cultural
activities, we create valuable jobs, foster dialogue between sighted
people and those with visual impairments, and open up new perspectives
for young and old alike.
blindekuh – the name means "Blind Man's Buff" in German – was
founded in 1999 and was the first establishment of its kind in the
world...
The blindekuh concept has been copied successfully several times.
blindekuh Zurich, the world's first restaurant in the dark, opened its
doors in September 1999. It was followed in April 2001 by the
"Unsicht-Bar" in Cologne and in June 2002 by "Nocti Vagus" in Berlin.
Another "Unsicht-Bar" opened in Berlin in September 2002, then came
"Dans le Noir" in Paris in September 2004, "Taste of Darkness" in the
Dialogue Museum in Frankfurt, and a further "Dans le Noir" in London.
blindekuh Basel opened in February 2005. The "Unsicht-Bar" in Hamburg
followed in September 2006, then "Dans le Noir" in Moscow just two
months later. The concept has since spread outside Europe, and blindekuh
is constantly receiving requests from around the world for support with
launching similar projects...
The blindekuh enterprises are self-supporting, so they receive no state
subsidies. The concept is labour-intensive, partly because operating in
the dark makes certain processes more difficult and also because guests
need more information and a higher level of service than in a
conventional catering outlet. Employees benefit from good working
conditions and wages above the market average. Our cultural events in
the dark and our staff's high availability for the media, schools and
other interested parties add to the concept's costs. For these reasons,
blindekuh relies on donations.
I was unaware of the existence of grape scissors/shears until I heard them mentioned in passing on a podcast of No Such Thing As A Fish. Found the image and the text below at AC Silver in the UK:
Grape shears and grape scissors are an instrument specifically
designed for cutting grape stalks, and are smaller and designed
especially for the purpose. Grape shears were invented in the 19th
century, and the earliest examples were from the Regency period,
although very few have survived and these early examples are
extraordinarily rare now.
These shears or scissors are about 6 to 7 inches (15 to 18 cm) long.
The handles are much longer than the blades, so that you can insert the
blades deeply into a cluster of grapes. Most of the scissor ends have
blunt tips, so that they won’t puncture the fruit.
The grape shears
would sometimes be found as part of a set with a grapestand, and the
earlier grape shears from the late Georgian period were more like
scissors, with equally long blades and handles. These were often
gold-gilt, demonstrating the high value that the grape shears had been
imbued with as an item of cutlery, and as part of a dinner service.
Later though, grape shears were usually made of sterling silver, as with
most high quality dinnerware, so as to avoid tarnishing and to stand
the test of time.
After the 1850s, most of the shears produced included a flange which
had been added to one of the blades, so that once the grapes had been
cut, they could then be elegantly placed on to the diner’s plate while
still holding the shears...
More at the link (along with other interesting silver info). My knee-jerk reaction was to mock the scissors (especially with silver plate and the velvet-lined custom container), but as I think about serving grapes, it is difficult to separate a cluster from a large bunch without placing the other hand on the bunch, so if grapes are shared with a larger group, the last person gets some much-handled fruit. At a picnic or with family, such considerations are insignificant, but I'm wondering if I were to serve grapes at a party whether passing around a pair of ordinary kitchen scissors would be appropriate, or would that be considered posh?
