'Iron Chef' goes to Washington

By Jo Piazza, CNN
November 5, 2009 4:19 p.m. EST

(CNN) -- The first lady of the United States has opened up the White House to the Food Network in an episode of "Iron Chef America" that will air in January.

Michelle Obama will appear on the show and announce the "secret ingredient" to the chefs before the competition. The episode, which has already been filmed, will feature chefs using ingredients that were grown in the Obama family's White House vegetable garden.

This will mark the first time that a first lady has appeared in a reality television series. Obama agreed to take part in the show as part of her efforts to promote healthy living to the American public.

The episode will feature White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford as well as celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse.

Cook-off judges include British chef Nigella Lawson, actress Jane Seymour and U.S. Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin.

During her appearance, Obama spoke about the influence that cooking shows like "Iron Chef" have on the American perception of healthy foods.

"It's going a long way to help change the way this country thinks about food," she told the chefs.

The first lady has begun a crusade to get Americans, particularly children, to follow a healthier diet. She launched the Healthy Kids Initiative to encourage healthier eating and urge children to reject fast food.

White House aides said that Obama's willingness to appear on the program and invite the show into her home proves her dedication to this cause.

Drunk Ewoks Invade a Live Halloween Segment on The Today Show

To Harvest Squash, Click Here

By Douglas Quenqua, The New York Times
October 29, 2009

AT high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables. “It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote this month in The Quad News, a student newspaper at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.

Adults, too, are blaming their problems on FarmVille, an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms carefully. On blogs like FarmVille Freak (slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”) and others, people share tips on fertilizer and complain about, for example, a spouse’s addiction.

An anonymous blogger who said she was pregnant wrote: “I was starving ... and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES! I waited ... in the car and waited for his stupid raspberries to be harvested.” That there are actual farmers who spend less time on their crops is beside the point. FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook.

More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world. Crazes on Facebook seem to come in waves — remember sheep-throwing, Vampire Wars and lists of “25 Random Things About Me?” — but devotion to FarmVille has moved beyond the social network.

Players gather online to share homemade spreadsheets showing which crops will provide the greatest return on investment. YouTube is rife with musical odes to the game, including versions of its theme song. There is a “Farmville Art” movement, in which people arrange crops to resemble the Mona Lisa or Mr. Peanut. And many a promising dinner date has been cut short to harvest squash.

“I can’t hang out with any of my friends without talk of apple fields and rice paddies,” said Taylor Lee Sivils, a student at the University of California, Riverside, in an e-mail message. “I have to wait for my friends’ soybeans to grow, because we can’t chill until they’ve been harvested. All I want is to be able to go back to talking about anything tangible, but FarmVille overcomes.”

The game starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons. Impatient players can use credit cards or a PayPal account to buy more money, although purists tend to frown on the practice.

But like The Sims and Tamagotchi pets, FarmVille soon becomes less of a game than a Sisyphean baby-sitting assignment. Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations — like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor’s pumpkins — must be met.

The game seems to have mesmerized people from all walks of life. Every night for the last two weeks, Jil Wrinkle, a 40-year-old medical transcriber in the Philippines, has set his alarm for 1:30 a.m., when he will wake up, roll over and harvest his blueberries. “I keep my laptop next to my bed,” he explained by phone. “The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is harvest, then I harvest again at 10 in the morning, then again in midafternoon, then in the evening, and then again right before going to bed.”

Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said he had seen the craze firsthand among his students. “Just like Guitar Hero lets you feel a little like being a rock star — you get to pose and dance a little while you’re doing it — with FarmVille there is a real sense that you’re actually doing something that has a cause and effect,” he said. “The method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying.”

FarmVille isn’t the only popular farm-theme game on Facebook. MyFarm and FarmTown, which are made by different companies, also have huge followings. Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life. “The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1).

Yet some of the game’s biggest fans are farmers. “I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming,” said Donna Schoonover, of Schoonover Farm in Skagit County, Wash., who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits (real ones!). “This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place.”

Zynga, which is based in San Francisco, specializes in games that are easy to learn but hard to walk away from. It also makes Mafia Wars (25 million players) and Café World (24 million), the second and third most popular games on Facebook, respectively. Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive, said that Zynga earns money from advertising, sponsorships and players who buy in-game cash. Zynga has been profitable since 2007, he said. “It’s really the same formula that makes Facebook successful,” Mr. Pincus said, “the ability to connect with your friends, to express yourself, and to invest in the game.”

FarmVille takes advantage of Facebook by allowing — nay, nagging — players to become “neighbors” with their friends, even those who have not joined the game. Players can earn points by helping with their neighbors’ work. They can also irritate friends who don’t want to play

FarmVille with endless notifications and invitations to join, which has led to a vocal backlash. Cropping up alongside fan blogs like Farmville Freak, which after just one month is getting 25,000 unique visitors a day, are Facebook groups for people who are tired of listening to their friends talk about their eggplants. On “I Hate FarmVille,” the largest of the anti-Farmville affinity groups on Facebook (it has more than 17,000 members), one person commented, “No, I will not give you a tree! No, I will not be your neighbor!”

Economy Doesn't Kill Appetite for Premium Foods

By Carol Lloyd, San Francisco Chronicle
November 1, 2009

Have you been to the San Francisco Ferry Building lately?

The economy may have many consumers in a stranglehold, but you'd never know it at ground zero for Bay Area food culture. Folks are still lining up to nibble on Scharffen Berger's Asante single origin chocolate ($7), to guzzle Blue Bottle's New Orleans iced coffee ($3), and to stock up on 7-ounce bottles of Stonehouse blood orange olive oil ($14).

I know, I know. You may not indulge in such edible extravagances. But before the boom expanded our grocery budget and the luxury food business stepped up to fulfill our every desire, how many of us indulged in gourmet vittles at all? Now many Bay Area residents are addicted to at least some level of gastronomic indulgence: If not coffee then tea, if not pomegranates then pine nuts, if not shiitakes then organic sausage.

Indeed, numbers support the idea that foodies (and we know the Bay Area has a lot of them) aren't willing to do without. According to consumer research firm Packaged Facts, sales of gourmet, specialty and premium foods and beverages have been growing at much faster rates than those of the overall food and beverage industry for the past five years.

In a recent Harris Poll (funded by Whole Foods), 51 percent reported eating dinner at home more often, but 76 percent said they were not willing to compromise on food quality, regardless of prices. Recent research by the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade found that consumers in the western United States are 13 percent more likely to buy specialty foods than the rest of the country.

Curious about how a new economic reality - 2.2 million unemployed people in California - has changed the market for gourmet foods, I began grilling Ferry Building merchants amid their impatient, hungry clientele (how long do you have to wait for a muffuletta, I ask you?). The response was unanimous: The bust had changed buying patterns, but not profit margins.

John Smit, owner of Hidden Star Orchards, purveyor of apples, grapes and delectable fresh squeezed juices, has noticed that though restaurant orders have declined, orders by small specialty grocers like Bi-Rite have more than made up the loss. "It's balanced out," he says.

Jacky Recchiuti, co-owner of Recchiuti Confections, echoed this sentiment. While big orders for parties and weddings had dropped, sales from individuals buying for their own consumption seem just as strong if not stronger than before. "There are fewer people," she said. "But those that come seem to buy more."

An assistant manager at Scharffen Berger (the other cacao den down the hall) speculated that the resilience of the high-end chocolate market is in fact a side effect of our new austerity: "I think people will luxuriate in a chocolate bar when they no longer let themselves go to restaurants."

Indeed, the gourmet product market seems to be surviving the restaurant industry's dark days - and even benefiting from them. (In a recent Bay Area survey by Zagat, 52 percent of responders reported that they were eating out less because of the slow economy.) A clerk at Stonehouse Olive Oil told me that sales have improved because people are cooking more.

If people were no longer buying the $5 T-shirts from Mervyns (which filed for Chapter 11 in July 2008), how could they afford $5 bars of chocolate?

"We've definitely cut back in all areas of spending except for food," said Adam Gard of Oakland, speaking for most locals queried in my random (albeit unscientific) survey about their food shopping habits. "It's the small daily pleasures that make the other sacrifices easier to handle. ... It's not cheap on the pocketbook, but we view it as an investment in our health along with our spirit ... the spirit that thrives on tasty edibles."

Many offered details about how their expensive purchases somehow managed to save them money. "The one area I absolutely will not compromise on is food," explained Holly Hansen, adding that she splurges regularly on free-range chickens for $20 each bought directly from a rancher. "They are worth every penny, and I can get at least two meals for my family of four out of them, because they go further and just taste so much better than some mass-produced chicken."

In a sense, food culture seems to be toughing it through economic times because it's not just about dollars and calories. In the Bay Area, food has become the presiding metaphor for a consciously led life: pleasure, politics, identity and love for family all wrapped up in one. And that's one reason why staying home for the holidays may not be cheap, but it's almost guaranteed to be tasty.

Week 11 Agenda

Chicken Tikka from Anjum Anand's Indian Food Made Easy (BBC Two, UK)

Week 11

M 11.2
Read: CR—“The Mixing of the Greens” by Louis P. DeGouy, “Macaroni and Lots of Cheese” by Julia Moskin
In-Class: Presentations; Lecture—“How to Write a Process Essay”
Due: Persuasive essay

W 11.4
Read: KC—pg. 3-35
In-Class: Process essay
Catering Group 1: Appetizer

UPCOMING:
WEEK 12

M 11.9
Read: KC—pg. 36-74
In-Class: Book discussion; Presentations
Journal 5 Prompt: Do the foods you eat say anything about your social standing? For example, can a correlation be made between the types of foods you eat and your income level, access to health care, and education? Using “Chewing the Fat: Alton Brown on Race, Class, and Food” from Serious Eats (eR) as a basis, explore the theory that your diet is a reflection of your socio-economic standing.
Due: Journal 5
Catering Group 2: Salad

W 11.11
NO CLASS—Veterans Day