the lunch line

(i eat nearly every meal at home now, like this fish stew, on its 

third day, made with potatoes, kale, carrots, leeks, and more)

i've been clawing and itching and dying to find just a half hour to sit down and write one of the dozen or so posts that've been stewing in my mind for the past couple of weeks, but somehow a half hour has become very difficult to find. funny thing.

but i couldn't help myself when i saw the chance to take the five minutes or so that it's gonna cost me to get this one up. this project hits close to home, and i hope to begin writing about the issues more and more in the coming days. we've heard the first lady is making it her mission to reform the school lunch program, but we all need to understand why it needs changing to begin with. we need to push past the surface and dig a bit deeper to learn what it is that we've been eating for so many years, and how truly harmful it's been for our health.

here's a starter, and a damn good little effort at that.

Lunch Line Trailer from uji films on Vimeo.

i gave twenty bucks. the way i see it, that's twenty bucks i'm not spending on take-out, restaurant, or some other over-priced and not-so-healthy food from somewhere else because instead, i'm gonna eat what's in my fridge!

my baby's name is jamco, new media

(the fun i have w/ my work... chef john caputo of

bin 36 cutting swordfish steaks before service)

to grab the bull by the horns, i've lost any momentum i had going with this blog with my writing silence over the past few months - and that's a major bummer to me.

i moved to chicago with no job and a recent master's degree specified to a field that - because i couldn't have plotted my career course better - doesn't exist in the job marketplace. it's not like there are tall buildings in new york full of firms eager and awaiting a creative writer to come and start crunching ledger sheets and quarterly earnings and mutual funds. writers crunch words, and as the internet grows, the written word holds less and less value.

so this blog, for all its worth, was my way to try and crack any kind of something that might lead to a job in chicago. and funny enough, it did.

writing that piece way back in july on stephanie izard's backyard party scored me a gig working her social media and website (a gig i'm still working). in turn, working for steph scored me a job waiting tables at hot chocolate, which is helmed by mindy segal who this year is nominated, for the fourth year in a row, for a james beard award for outstanding pastry chef in the country - and she's gonna win it this year. while i swore off waiting tables ever again after leaving boston, i made some good cash working this job and became friends with even better people, one of which set up an introduction to a woman i'd heard so much about, even before moving to chicago, and i badly wanted to meet. it was through this woman - i don't know why i'm keeping her anonymous, her name is ellen malloy - that i found work with the hearty boys doing the same type of work that i do for steph. that was november.

and i think it's pretty safe to say that november was the last month that i really kept this blog running at a pace that engaged the few readers i had.

(when the hearty boys' catering vans

were tagged, there was work for me!)

a couple weeks after i met ellen another friend of mine, who i also met at stephanie's dinner, referred me to bin 36 for social media work and again, i'm doing the same type of stuff for them that i do for steph. obviously, a pattern was developing. restaurants and chefs, so consumed with the thousand moving parts that compose restaurant operation, had no time to keep up with this new thing called social media, but like those who i'm working with, were smart enough to understand they needed to find some way to manage social media somehow in order to keep their business relevant. which, is too bad when you think of it, because shouldn't food speak for itself?

(and work with steph is never dull...)

the pattern was obvious. there was work to be had in this field, and there were few in chicago who could do it. and so, almost five months later, i'm finally putting the last pieces in place to move forward and enter this wide open field.

my company is called jamco, new media and when the logo is finished, it'll be a playfully spilled jar of jam that i hope will reflect my laid back and fun edge, while still instilling the confidence and appearance of someone who gets it. because if it doesn't, then obviously... i don't get it. and there's a good chance i just don't.

i'm working with lawyers for the first time in my life and saving up cash for the big checks i'll have to write to get this thing going. but it's fun - a lot of fun - and hopefully, i'll be back in my old cities, crossing familiar bridges, and pulling along old and new friends on this venture (that's right dante, i'm coming for you!)

so here i am, clearing the stale air from the past few months that covered the navel - and i hope taking the first step to resurrecting this little platform of mine to share these little stories about this stuff i love so much, this stuff called food.

know what seafood you should be eating, and what you shouldn't be

(the copper river in alaska, source of some of the finest

salmon in the world, via walt k's photostream.)

it's not often i find comments on the blog—and worse, not often i'm posting—but this morning i came across a comment that was left on the blog yesterday afternoon, and after spending the better part of the last thirty minutes responding, i realized i'd actually written my first post in weeks.

so, to break the silence, more on salmon, starting with the comment:

how does one know if the "wild salmon" served in a restaurant, really is viable wild salmon?

and, my attempt to answer...

first off, our consciousness needs to improve on all aspects of seafood, not just salmon. with that, the monterey bay aquarium has established a program that constantly studies and analyzes the status of catch around the world, and rates their finds in a guide that's available for anyone to use (broken down depending on where you live in the u.s.).

go here to get it. but seriously, go there. and don't just read it, but print this out and bring it with you. or better yet, do the environment one better and download the app on your phone!

(the seafood card i use here in chicago. where is yours?)

right now, wild alaskan salmon (and that's what the menu needs to read, be it king, sockeye, or coho) is the only salmon you should feel good about eating. even then, eat in moderation. the demand is far too great if we consistently eat this fish and will eventually deplete the supply if it remains the only sustainable salmon option.

the western u.s. wild salmon fishing is on the rise, and hopefully even california will enter the picture as a local option, which is what we need. currently, wild salmon from washington is recommended as an alternative to wild alaskan.

which leaves us with farmed and atlantic salmon - which, like i point out in the post, is farmed salmon from european countries on the atlantic seaboard like norway, scotland, ireland, and iceland.

that said, some european salmon farms are on the upswing in practices and soon enough we may see a shift.

(the seafood card i'll use when traveling to

california this summer... unless it changes.)

so when you're at a sushi bar and all the menu reads is "salmon." ask where it's from. most sushi bars will print "wild alaskan" or "king salmon" because it costs them far more to purchase, and hence will charge you more to eat it. whether you're at a chain restaurant like maggiano's or a steakhouse like ruth's chris or you're even at some swanky restaurant in a downtown hotel, even then, avoid the salmon—if you truly want to make a difference both for yourself, our fisheries, and the environment—unless it reads... "wild alaskan!" simple enough, right?

(and, finally, the seafood card i use when eating sushi!)

the other thing to do? try other fish! go to the link above and find out what other options there are for you. just because you don't recognize the name of this fish doesn't mean it's not worth eating. you'd be surprised how good these fish are, and might even like them better than the beloved salmon...

the slow money alliance: change

i've written about slow money in the past, and today i'm asking for your help. please take your time and vote, they're so close to their goal...

the trouble with atlantic salmon: an identity crisis

(photo via the pure salmon campaign)

i once worked at a restaurant that served two types of salmon. one type was five dollars less than the other, and obviously sold far more in quantity than that which cost more. this restaurant is one of many belonging to what is possibly the greatest seafood empire in the country, so diners certainly sit at its tables with a sense of trust, that regardless of what they order, by dining there they're treating themselves to something special. but let's really think about this. truly. if one piece of salmon is listed on the menu for $19.95, and the other for $24.95, shouldn't we be looking up from our menus, scratching our heads, and asking our table-mates, why?

so the question is now before you. seriously, why do you think this is?

well, let's start by building the differences between these two types of fish. the $25 salmon is from the wild, and the $20 salmon is not. reason enough for a difference of five bucks, right? if that's the case, and if the $20 salmon isn't from the wild, could you confidently answer if i asked you, where the heck is it from then? if it's not wild, what the heck is it?

and that's the problem that people grapple with. on the whole, the problems with fishing ethics are so tertiary in politics and media, so muted, that people just don't know what's going on. don't know where their food is coming from (which, funny enough, parallels the factory farming problem far too much). and that's because when it comes down to it, we're taught to understand that cows graze and do so on land, birds fly and do so through the air, and fish, well they swim, and swimming is only done through water. and water is something our planet has lots of, so there should be lots of fish. one plus one then equals: shouldn't all fish be from the wild? the answer is yes, but yet, somehow the laws of nature have been tinkered with, and now we have fish coming from that thing that cows, the land grazing animal, call home. farms.

so how about this: one salmon is from alaska, and the other is from the atlantic. now, do you know which is wild caught and which is farm raised? do you know why?

my guess is, most people know that alaskan salmon is the cream of the crop. i'd even go so far as to say this is one the first fish most of us had ever known. remember those nature videos from our childhood? disney was infamous for them, airing often on the wonderful world of disney, remember? the stunning wildlife images of a day in the life of a grizzly bear? of the bear lurking over a shallow stream, her paw swiping at the water and pulling from it a flopping fish? and that fish, the one she'd strip clean of flesh and feed to her cubs, well, that's wild alaskan salmon. and yes, we pay top dollar for it.

but why does it cost so much more than atlantic salmon? hell, if it's atlantic salmon, it's got to be wild too, right?

on friday, mark bittman wrote this in his blog about "discovering alaskan king salmon:"

What an odd history salmon has had, not only in my lifetime but in the history of the world. (There was once so much salmon in the rivers of the Northeast that according to some historians,  servants complained about being fed the fish too often. Supposedly.)

Like so many baby-boomer East Coasters, I experienced salmon first as a canned fish. (Tuna too, of course. Who knew?) It was also an absolute luxury item at white tablecloth restaurants; I might have eaten it fresh two or three times – max – in the 60s and 70s. That’s because Atlantic salmon (of which there is only one species) had become not only overfished but endangered. (You can’t sell wild Atlantic salmon commercially.)

"you can't sell wild atlantic salmon commercially." did you catch that? do you realize the weight of those words? they're telling us that to all but a small minority of this world, true atlantic salmon, the stuff that makes its home the way nature intended, in the wild, does not exist. so what then is this stuff called "atlantic salmon?"

(norwegian atlantic salmon farm, via trondj's photostream)

two years before i started working at that seafood restaurant in boston that listed the two different salmons on the menu, the company launched a campaign around wild alaskan salmon. that was six years ago. here's how the menu reads today:

(menu via legal sea foods, park square)

ironically enough, just six years after launching a campaign to attract diners to eat the more expensive wild alaskan salmon, the fish has disappeared from the restaurant's menu, and the price of our mystery fish has increased.

so what is this mystery fish? and why does it dominate restaurant menus all over the country? again, we'll find a parallel to the corporate giants who have decimated our country's beef, pork, and poultry farming. the shades might be drawn when it comes to the dirty work, but make no mistake these corporate entities are slipping in and out of bed with the world's governments night after night.

spend the three minutes it takes to watch the video below. it's three minutes spent better than almost anything else you could be doing right now, including reading this blog post. again, so much of america's problem when it comes to food is the lack of knowledge we have about what it is, and where it comes from.

i realize how difficult it is to sit down and spend twenty minutes, let alone the three it took to watch that clip, but that's how long this documentary is. just twenty minutes. and in twenty minutes, you're learning more about this food than you've ever known about it. if that's not enough to convince you to watch the entire film, what is?

and that seafood restaurant i worked at in boston? it's called legal sea foods. yeah, you might've heard of it. when the company brought wild alaskan salmon to all of its restaurants six years ago, here's what roger berkowitz, the ceo and president of the giant chain, had to say about wild alaskan and atlantic salmon:

There's nothing wrong with farmed salmon. It's perfectly fine to serve. But wild salmon has different flavor characteristics. It's more interesting. And we're in the fish business--it's incumbent upon us to offer products that others would have trouble getting.

apparently, they're having trouble getting the wild stuff just like everyone else now. incumbent, or not.

(legal sea foods' wood-grilled salmon,

via asir-selvasingh's photostream)

and, yet, what trouble does the company go to in order to bring in the farm-raised atlantic salmon? if you watch the four clips of that documentary, you'll see that atlantic salmon is literally being harvested, boxed, and shipped overnight by fedex from europe every day, which really, i guess means the trouble for roger berkowitz in obtaining the fish is the occasional need to get up and out of his desk chair to sign for the delivery when nobody else is around?

no. the trouble roger berkowitz, and the rest of the consumers who purchase and sell atlantic salmon (and we're talking a massive amount of people here) have is an environmental trouble. it's a trouble that for those of us living today, especially those of us completely detached from our planet's well being, is irrelevant. it's as pesky as a house fly buzzing though the kitchen on a summer day. we can just ignore the thing and get by just fine, and leave the problem for someone else to deal with later on.

(sea lice, a tremendous infector of atlantic salmon,

via neil blake's photostream)

as the video details, atlantic salmon farms are stationed off the coasts of european countries. a popular salmon in restaurants today is scottish salmon, though farms exist and were made popular in norway, and are even found in iceland and other countries. these farms are over-crowded, ridden with disease, and eliminate the crucial variable to life of all species, which is natural selection. think about it, when a child of any species is born in the wild with an illness, it eventually dies. for humans, modern medicine has curbed these statistics, but that's not so in the wild. animals are often prey, and those not fit to survive in turn fuel the life of a creature better suited to live on than the prey. this can't happen in salmon farms. it's impossible. which means we're massively introducing a fish to our markets whose mortality rate in the wild ranges at best around 50%. and consider this, what if these defected fish, pumped with antibiotics and carrying scientifically modified dna, broke free from their farm habitat and spawned with pure fish in the wild? yeah, that's really happening, and some fear it won't be long before a true wild salmon, the fish that swam long before man came along, is completely extinct.

changes are being made to farming methods, but is it too late? and is change coming fast enough?

but americans want to eat good food, and do so with as little damage inflicted upon their checking accounts as possible. and, i have to imagine, roger berkowitz (a semi-finalist of the recently announced james beard award for outstanding restaurateur) is only too pleased to oblige.

fun with blogs

 

the bin 36 blog launched yesterday, and for those who love reading about food, i thought i'd share it with you. this baby has been about a month or so in the making, from when i started design work and began implementing an editorial schedule for the boys to follow, and we're thinking it might really take off... would love it if you commented on the posts and shared your thoughts!

the calamari taco lunch

as i get more and more involved with the uncharted territory before me, i have a feeling i'll be spending a lot of time working from home. like today. and like today, i'm hoping i'll be spending more time in the kitchen making my own lunch—which for more than two weeks now, along with every other meal, have been absent of the one thing i've always treasured above so much else: meat. meat, pork, poultry... all of the things that vegetarians don't eat, i haven't been eating either. but despite how easy it's been to cut the stuff out of my diet, i'm having trouble calling myself a vegetarian. but this is a different story, one i keep on pushing out of my psyche—i think because i just never thought this would happen to me. maybe it's shock—that no doubt i'll sit down and tackle soon enough. but for now, for today, i was inspired by lunch.

calamari tacos. i cut and then sautéed the calamari, chopped some white onion and tossed it with cilantro and lime, shaved some radish, and cut the avocado.

and they couldn't have lasted more than two minutes on my plate.