Food Preservation Disasters

...us websites. Some sources I’ve come to trust: The National Center for Home Food Preservation’s website. Kevin West’s book Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving . Between those two sources I’ve got just about all the recipes I need. One Ring to rule them all When you’re done processing jars and they’ve cooled down, remove the screw bands. Why? So you can clean underneath the band to prevent spoilage and bugs. T...

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I Ate 100 Power Bars

...ropriated as the latest buzz-phrase by large food companies. Every natural food product is labeled either “pro-biotic” or “pre-biotic.” If one could distill all those booths down to one item you’d end up with a pro-biotic turmeric, kimchi, kombucha, paleo sports bar grown “regeneratively,” whatever that means. But I’m getting cranky again. On a more positive note I met a nice Root Simple reader who works for Q Drinks, an Oakland, California based...

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On the Problem of Food Storage and Hoarding

...ditional storage always leads us down the path of over-consumption. If the Food Network ever makes a foodie hoarder reality show, we could have been on an episode thanks to the shelves we added to the utility room. Those shelves quickly filled with aspirational but never used ingredients such as tapioca flour as well as mediocre food preservation projects that I just couldn’t admit defeat on. Our kitchen’s ample built-in cabinets. When it came tim...

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Composting: Nothing is Wasted

...ting for Newell Rubbermaid Inc.’s Rubbermaid consumer line, which includes food storage containers. “Consumers have the feeling of not being competent…” (WSJ, April 22, 2015, D1) Despite our guilt, according the WSJ, we’re wasting more food all the time. We’re wasting three times more than we wasted in 1960. That makes sense in lots of ways, including the advent of all these super-sized retailers with their perverse economies of scale inducing us...

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Too Good to Go?

...ech company monetizing something that would otherwise have gone to, say, a food bank, a gleaning service like Food Forward or to employees. A worker at one of the bakeries assured me that this food would have ended up in the dumpster so, perhaps, Too Good to Go is at least a neutral service. Salvaging the food waste stream is a neighborhood organizing project waiting to happen that would be nice to take away form the tech people. That said, I don’...

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