The City of Santa Monica is looking to displace a year old homeless feeding program because it is too successful.
ABC7:
Steve Petramale has been feeding at least 100 homeless people every week at Reed Park for more than a year.
Santa Monica officials told Petramale the park is not a good location for his food program. They had threatened to issue a citation if he served meals this Sunday.
Petramale says he's willing to work with the city to find a new location, but he wants to make sure the meals continue.
"I'm more than willing to make this work so everyone is happy and especially that these people eat," he said. "That's my main concern."
Some neighborhood residents have complained.
"Neighbors are concerned about the amount of people, the lack of play space," said Alisa Orduna, an advisor on homelessness with the city of Santa Monica. "The lack of space to be able to stretch out and have their activities."
Petramale says he's sympathetic.
"I understand your concern and why you're upset but I really do feel, regardless, everyone needs to eat," he said.
You may donate to Petramale's organization FamilyFood.us via Venmo. Read the rest
Seamus Blackley, "father of the Xbox," worked with Egyptologist Serena Love and microbiologist Richard Bowman to extract yeast from 4,500-year-old Egyptian bread-making and beer-making potter held in the collection of Harvard's Peabody Museum; though nearly all of the samples are being cultured for analysis and addition to a microorganism library, Blackley cultured one sample to use in a dough-starter for a baking project.
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Get a load of this delicious video of a beekeeper slicing that honeycomb down, from which to extract this year's honey harvest. Read the rest
Great Big Story went to Tokyo to visit five small restaurants that make different kinds of popular street foods: takoyaki (pieces of octopus in griddle-cooked balls of dough, yakisoba (fried noodles, meat, and vegetables), gyoza (Chinese dumplings), okonomiyaki (crepes with noodles, cabbage, pork, and egg), and taiyaki (fish-shaped pancakes with sweet fillings). My mouth was watering as I watched this.
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Taylor Jackson challenged himself to photograph cheap pre-packaged frozen dinners so the look like a fancy food photo of a dish from a posh restaurant. To get it done, he sought the help of a professional chef pal who is a master at plating. From PetaPixel:
The actual shooting starts around the 14 minutes mark (in the video below), if you want to skip straight to that to see how Jackson made this shoot work using only one camera (Nikon Z6) and one lens (NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.8S). No macro lens. No artificial light. None of those crazy food photography tricks we’ve all heard about.
View this post on Instagram $3 TV Dinner Challenge! Yesterday @liamgoodvisuals and I challenged @the_nomad_chef to plate TV Dinners to look like 5 star meals. Full video out Monday. Until then - left is a Swanson’s Salisbury Steak, middle is a no name fettuccine alfredo, and the right is a Korean Beef Bowl. Shot on a Nikon Z6 with the 35mm S. #cheflife #nikon #nikonz6 #foodphotography #foodstagram #foody
A post shared by 📷 Taylor Jackson (@taylorjackson) on Jul 18, 2019 at 6:19am PDT
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Ten years ago, we showed you a method for baking cookies on your car dashboard on hot days while you're at work, filling your car with delicious baking smells and a tray of warm cookies for the commute home.
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A family-run restaurant in Bangkok has had a the same giant pot of soup simmering for 45 years. When it runs low, they top it off.
From Great Big Story:
It’s a beef noodle soup called neua tuna. It simmers in a giant pot. Fresh meat like raw sliced beef, tripe and other organs is added daily. But any broth leftover is preserved at the end of each day and used in the next day’s soup. It’s an ancient cooking method that gives the soup a unique flavor and aroma.
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FDA (totally not in thrall to Big Dairy): we're going to ban calling almond milk "milk"; Missouri State legislature (totally not in thrall to Big Ag): hold my beer.
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A simple but effective tip for a better burger, from Boing Boing buddy Gareth Brawnyn's excellent "Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales" e-newsletter:
Here’s a life-thing that you need to know about, especially before this weekend’s cookouts. How often do you get a restaurant burger, or grill one yourself, and before you’re finished horking it down, the soggy bun has lost the will to live and has disintegrated in your hands? Here’s the fix for your fixins. Don’t place the meat directly on the bun or the condiments on top of the lettuce. Place lettuce between the meat and the bun and between the condiments and the bun. No more soggy burger.
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GrubHub is buying up thousands of restaurant web addresses, and “also appears to publish shadow pages without owners' consent—sometimes in direct competition with real websites,” reports The New Food Economy.
Why would the app-based restaurant delivery service do such a crazy thing?
It looks like the reason may be -- shocking, I know! -- predatory greed. Read the rest
Bon Appetit's 20-tip roundup of salad-making tips is full of culinary wisdom, from the mechanical (how to use a salad-spinner properly and how to apply dressing for a good, even coat that doesn't turn delicates to mush) to the chemical (using salt to tenderize raw cabbage) to the culinary (toast your nuts, put chopped veg in your dressing, mix your vinegars). It's a great and timely piece for anyone getting ready to enjoy the summer's garden veg or anyone trying to get kids to eat more veggies. (via Kottke)
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Kraft has launched "Salad Frosting" as part of a jokey marketing campaign about the lies that parents tell their kids. Because, y'know, deceit is funny and those kids who already like ranch dressing will be too dumb to recognize that this is the same thing while those who can't stand the stuff will suddenly develop a taste for it because of the "fun" packaging. From the press release:
“Innocent lies parents tell their kids help alleviate the pressures of everyday parenting, and if it gets kids to eat their greens, so be it,” says Sergio Eleuterio Head of Marketing for Kraft, “Simple innocent lies are not only part of parenthood, but a true tactic used by parents everywhere. Kraft Salad 'Frosting' is one lie you won’t feel bad telling your kids.”
According to a recent study, Ranch dressing is the most popular dressing in the United States*** and kids will eat anything with frosting, right? It’s a match made for dinnertime bliss. Now, convincing children to eat salad, broccoli and carrots may be a whole lot easier. Just add Kraft Salad “Frosting.”
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The Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) is a nonprofit that kicked off its mysterious existence by filing a string of lawsuits against restaurant chains and coffee roasters for not posting California Proposition 65 notices (the notices are mandatory warnings about the presence of "chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and reproductive toxicity") despite the disputed science behind their demands.
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“Combining the public humiliation of racists and one of nature’s most delicious frosty treats is pure poetry in motion,” writes Kim Kelly at VICE's Munchies, where we also read a disclaimer we'd like to pass on to you: “For legal reasons, we must mention that throwing milkshakes qualifies as assault in some jurisdictions.” Read the rest
California bans eating roadkill in part because it's viewed as a temptation for poachers to disguise their kills as road accidents; but that means a lot of game goes to waste (at least 20,000 deer alone are hit by Californians every year -- some researchers put the number at 80,000), and the animals involved are left to die slow deaths by the roadside.
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CBD-infused snacks could soon join the product line that includes Chips Ahoy cookies, Cadbury chocolate, and Nutter Butter cookies. Read the rest
