Archive for January, 2010
I gotta admit, I’m miffed. Emeril (BAM!) Lagasse, Bobby Flay, and Mario Batalli all lied to us. Was that a bit strong? Well, maybe they fudged the truth is more like it.
I watched that episode of Iron Chef, the one where Michelle Obama made a brief appearance to announce that the show’s “secret ingredient” was to be the vegetables from the White House garden.
All through the hour the audience heard Emeril droning on and on about the superior quality of the White House vegetables they were cooking with.
Now it turns out our four competing chefs weren’t cooking with these vegetables extraordinaire after all. Turns out that the veggies used in the episode were locally sourced (and by extension not from the White House garden) according to a spokesperson for Food Network.
Photo courtesy of The Food Network
The Baltimore Sun is reporting
that the vegetables used in the Jan. 3 episode of the Iron Chef — which were supposed to have been harvested from the White House vegetable garden — were actually stunt doubles.
First Lady Michelle Obama famously appeared with competitors Bobbie Flay, Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batalli, who were joined by White House chef Cristeta Comerford, and charged them with making healthy meals with whatever they could find in the garden.
Apparently, the time lag between the White House harvest scene filmed in October and the cooking competition filmed a week later in New York was too great for the vegetables to have remained fresh.
It is also reported here that the ratings for the White House Iron Chef of America special “set new viewer records for Food Network. ….With about 4.6 million viewers, it was the highest rated and most-watched show in Food Network’s history.”
This one really got to me.
Last week, if you missed the story, the New York Times did a story on clothing retailer, H&M. It seems that they have been tossing out and destroying perfectly good clothes that they could not sell; cutting the fingers off of gloves, putting knives and scissors to shirts, jackets, etc.
At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed.
In the process of researching this story, it turns out that the practice of tossing and destroying goes much further than one chain. It being reported that Wal-Mart is a participant in the same practice. The question is how many other retailers are engaged in the same wasteful practice?
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, said that she had been unable to learn why new clothing with the store’s tags had been destroyed, but she added that the company typically donated or recycled such items.
There is an update. H&M has agreed to no longer continue this hateful, wasteful practice.
“It will not happen again,” said Nicole Christie, a spokeswoman for H & M in New York. “We are committed 100 percent to make sure this practice is not happening anywhere else, as it is not our standard practice.”
Ms. Christie said that H & M’s standard practice was to donate unworn clothing to aid organizations. She said that she did not know why the store on 34th Street was slashing the clothes, and that the company was checking to make sure that none of its other stores were doing it.
Had it not been for the persistence of Cynthia Magnus, a graduate student at the City University of New York, we may never have known about this needless destruction of clothing and goods.
Imagine my surprise, when by happenstance I checked the ingredients on the back of the bag of one of my favorite gummi candies.
Let’s see … corn syrup, sucrose, gelatin, apple juice (that’s good, right?), natural and artificial flavor, carnauba wax.
Hey, wait a minute, what’s that doing there? Isn’t carnauba wax for the outside of my car?
Know what really makes me so unhappy? It’s not as if I’m not aware that one should always read the ingredients of anything that we decide to ingest. I do know that, but really, is nothing sacred?
Guess what? I now know carnauba wax is put in a variety of foods in addition to be used on my floors. As this writer from FitSugar notes:
I didn’t know this, but carnauba wax is often called the “queen of waxes.” It’s a hard substance, so it’s used to make durable coatings for floors and cars. It’s also used in polishes, varnishes, and beauty products like mascara, deodorant, and lipstick. In foods, it’s used as a coating or anti-caking agent, and can be found in frosting, candies (such as Altoids and Tic Tacs), gum, gravies, and sauces.
All of this leads me to another imponderable.
Why is my chewing gum individually packaged in plastic! For years we got along fine with our Chiclets packaged in a paper product with cellophane to show the gum product. Now gum is hermetically sealed in plastic … the gum will last 15 minutes and the plastic that will last many hundreds of years longer than the gum. Isn’t this just a bit excessive? Really the operative word is silly. This is a silly, nonsensical use of plastic.
And this makes sense, she rhetorically queries?
