‘United Airlines overhauls its 2020 menu to cater more to the vegan crowd’ ∞

October 26, 2019

Barbara Booth for MSNBC:

Although the airline started introducing healthier options this year, with gluten-free alternatives, the carrier is now focusing heavily on plant-based options, said United Airlines’ Executive Chef Gerry Gulli. Among United’s 2020 offerings: red beet hummus with roasted vegetables; roasted curry cauliflower with whipped hummus and pomegranate; and vegan stuffed grape leaf with dolma infused yogurt.

United is not alone. Turkish Airlines, Air New Zealand, Emirates and Aegean also offer plant-based options. In July 2018 Air New Zealand collaborated with Silicon Valley food tech start-up Impossible Foods, becoming the first airline to serve the plant-based Impossible Burger as part of its Business Premier menu on flights from Los Angeles to Auckland. Emirates claims it has more than 170 plant-based recipes in its kitchen to cater to its vegan customers, and vegan meals rank as the third most commonly requested special meal in economy class.

I’ve had some terrific food on international flights in the past few years. British Airways, Virgin, and Delta all offered flavorful vegan options—usually a curry with rice and vegetables. And always with fresh berries or a wonderful raw, chocolate cake.

‘These $50 Chicken Nuggets Were Grown in a Lab’ ∞

October 25, 2019

Deena Shanker for Bloomberg:

At a 93,000-square-foot warehouse-office in San Francisco’s Mission District, they’re growing chicken. Not chicken the animal—chicken the protein.

Just Inc., the maker of plant-based mayonnaise and vegan eggs, is using cellular agriculture to take extracted animal cells and turn them into chicken nuggets. Technicians grow the cells (the company’s catalog includes both stem cells and not) in baths of nutrient-rich liquid media, a bespoke “feed” that includes salts, sugars, amino acids, and often, notably, no animal molecules at all. Just is turning huge bioreactors into mini chicken farms, getting cells to multiply naturally, without an animal body to house them.

I feel like paragraphs like these are intended to scare people, and maybe they should scare people. After Michael Pollan said we shouldn’t eat anything that our great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, stories like these are mental gymnastics for these new meat technologies — even the ones just made of plants. Even if we know they’ll naturally be better for the planet and animals generally.

And now they’re ready for the market:

The chicken nuggets are still being refined, but they’re ready for small-scale commercialization, Just says, and restaurant partners are already lined up. They’ll be the first cultured meat product available to consumers, even if, at $50 a pop to make, they’re limited to diners with deep pockets—and a taste for adventure.

I wonder who will get these first. I’m guessing they’ll follow Impossible’s template: a few restaurants in major cities (SF first because Just Inc. is there, and then LA and NYC), then a celeb chef or two, then expand in those cities and start hitting festivals with a truck.

In June the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit promoting cellular agriculture and plant-based foods, counted 26 companies focused solely on cellular agriculture, including Memphis Meats, backed by Tyson Foods Inc., and cell-based seafood maker BlueNalu Inc., which plans to introduce yellowtail and mahi-mahi in a Southern California test market in two to three years. These startups are selling the idea of a real, not plant-based, meat that’s better for the environment and public health and has zero animal-welfare concerns.

I love that everyone isn’t working on one singular kind of thing. I imagine a breakthrough from one company could be a sea change that pulls all up—in texture, taste, and form. Similar to what Impossible and Beyond have done for plant-based meats.

Just says it’s been market-ready since 2018, but before anyone can sell it, a government needs to give the cell-based industry the green light. And for that, all eyes are on Asia. […] Growing lots of meat in relatively tiny spaces is an attractive proposition.

I’m very interested in the language that will be used around these. As the price drops and they become more competitive with the traditional meat market, I think we’ll see a bigger corporate backlash than we did when veggie patties called themselves burgers and Big Beef went bonkers. Read this bit:

But the biggest hurdle may not be the science, or the regulators, or the funding. It’s disgust. Nobody can even agree on what to call the protein: clean meat, cell-based, cellular, cultured, cultivated? No stranger to controversy, Tetrick tested “slaughter-free” on this Bloomberg Businessweek reporter. (She voted no.)

My money is on cultivated meat because it sounds agricultural. And I think that would make people feel at ease.

‘Veggie-First Eating, and Thinking’ ∞

October 25, 2019

Alexandra Weiss for the NYTimes:

Veggie Mijas is a collective of over 300 nonbinary, female-identifying people and women of color in 12 chapters across the United States, and the group — originally founded by Amy Quichiz and Mariah Bermeo — facilitates community building through vegan potlucks, cleaning up community gardens and hosting youth seminars to teach children about the importance of growing their own food.

“Veggie Mijas is about reclaiming what a plant-based lifestyle looks like, which isn’t just about not eating meat,” said Ms. Quichiz, 24, a native of Queens, N.Y., who is Peruvian and Colombian. “It’s about what we can do for our communities, and about reflecting on the systems around us that impact the choices that we make.”

I’ve written about Veggie Mijas before, but I wanted to post this larger and longer story. This has some nice tips for new vegans from queer and people-of-color communities.

‘Wildseed is vegan — but don’t call it that’ ∞

October 25, 2019

Soleil Ho has been on a tear recently for the SF Chronicle writing about their vegan community. In her latest, this part on language pulled me in:

Though zealotry is a common negative stereotype about vegans, it’s interesting to see how a dietary proselytization is reframed at Wildseed. The purpose of the restaurant, whose owners are mostly omnivorous but spent some time eating vegan to better understand the idea, is to win over agnostics of an occasional vegan diet. There’s even explicit language in Wildseed’s promotional materials that ties that choice with moral and ethical goodness: “Wildseed offers guests a chance to make a better choice — a place where you can feel good about the decisions you are making,” the website states. Still, the language is soft and almost vague in its calls to action, refraining from doomsaying or calling out bad behavior.

The menu at Wildseed avoids using the word “vegan,” which leads to slight confusion when ingredients like sour cream and Parmesan are presented plainly. Though the menu does say that everything is “plant-based,” it’s reasonable for newbies to do some mental contortion and assume that sun + grass x cow = cheese. […] (Adding to this conceptual knot is the fact that mushrooms aren’t technically plants.)

[…]

When asked about this, the servers do their best to work around the terminology: “We don’t use any animal products,” they say.
They could save some words by just saying “vegan,” but there’s a point to this.

The approach is indicative of a burgeoning countermovement to veganism that has adopted its diet, but not its politics of disruption. 

[…]

When asked about the difference between the terms, Mark Bomford, a farmer and director of Yale University’s Sustainable Food Program, said that it comes down to a value proposition: “vegan” and “meat-free” make you think that you’re abstaining or giving something up, whereas “plant-based” or “plant-strong” have more forward propulsion. “In terms of marketing communication, it’s about winning, not about losing,” he said.

Perhaps the key to Wildseed’s success is the fact that “vegan” and “vegetarian” can do double duty to describe both a product and a personal identity, whereas the comparatively more apolitical “plant-based” cannot. Its voice of persuasion is intentionally dulcet-toned, enticing like that of a siren.

As a descriptivist, this language in flux is confusing, exciting, and enticing. People, restaurants, and companies are still navigating these terms daily, and many are reaching new conclusions about how they want to phrase and approach the topic of veganism. Luckily, it all serves a greater purpose: more delicious food.

‘The Key Ingredient in These Hot Sauces, Gins, and Jerky? It’s Seaweed’ ∞

October 23, 2019

Kate Krader for Bloomberg News:

It’s rare to get good news from the sea. Water ­temperatures are rising, fish stocks are being depleted, and the fish we eat are increasingly full of microplastics. But the oceans do hold one positive portent: seaweed. It’s ­regenerative—it can grow about a foot a day—and carbon- and nitrogen-sequestering. Research suggests that, per acre, it can absorb more than 20 times as much carbon dioxide as a forest.

[…]

“We are eyes on the blue green economy,” says Chelsea Briganti, chief executive officer of utensil maker Loliware. “Seaweed represents an opportunity, everywhere you look.”

That would be incredible if seaweed could cure our plastic problem. And this list is filled with possibilities. Hot sauce, sea grapes, one-use ketchup packets, sauerkraut, and this is just the beginning.

‘The First Thing That Ever Sold Online Was Pizza’ ∞

October 22, 2019

Jay Hoffman writing for the History of the Web:

If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online.

You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, a way for Pizza Hut to test the waters and see if this World Wide Web thing had a real shot at a future. It was proposed by a particularly ambitious Pizza Hut owner in Santa Cruz, and developed by a few folks at a development shop known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).

This being something of a trial run, the site itself was kept pretty basic. Yet it bursted with possibility. Any web user could go online, visit pizza.net, fill out a form that included their pizza choice, address, and phone number and just like that, get a pizza delivered straight to their door. The web may not have been exactly designed for this purpose, but that didn’t stop it from being pretty incredible.

The minimalism of old websites is beautiful. I hope they bring this back when Pizza Hut expands their first (!) vegan trial in the USA.

‘The US Government’s Trove of Beautiful Apple Paintings’ ∞

October 18, 2019

The National Agricultural Library has over 3800 splendid watercolor paintings of apples. And if that doesn’t satisfy you, they have strawberries, softly translucent grapes, golden pineapples, and purple raspberries. A visual feast.

All made between 1886 to 1942, these tinged-by-time paintings look incredible up close. Click on one and then download a high-quality dopamine festival for your eyes.

Now, I’m hungry

(Via Kottke.org)

‘Go ahead, California, enjoy that roadkill’ ∞

October 18, 2019

Kate Bernot for The Takeout:

California Governor Gavin Newsom must be getting writer’s cramp with all the legislation he’s signed recently. Within the last week, he’s banned school lunch debt shaming, outlawed production of new fur coats, and given Californians the thumbs up on eating roadkill. That latter piece of legislation, Senate Bill 395, makes California the most recent of more than 20 states that allow motorists to salvage and eat animals killed by vehicles—and it’s a great idea.

This feels like an odd thing to celebrate, but I’m happy this has become a law in California. If an animal is struck by a car, that accident shouldn’t be left to waste. That life should be used and used well. I was surprised to learn 20 other states already had this program. I’d heard about these laws before, but hadn’t realized how many states had already adopted them.

Legislative text explaining the pilot program—which will cover three geographic areas known to have high wildlife-vehicle collision rates—say it will “translate into hundreds of thousands of pounds of healthy meat that could be utilized to feed those in need.”

[…]

This all seems like a fine way to ensure that at least some edible meat that would have otherwise gone to waste could now be used to feed Californians. If a motorist hits a deer—or damn, an elk—that could yield enough meat to feed a family throughout much of the year. If the prospect of eating roadkill doesn’t sit right with you, of course, just leave it. Surely one man’s roadkill is another man’s filet mignon.

I hope soon that all 50 states have a program like this. We shouldn’t waste a life.

‘Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties’ ∞

October 16, 2019

From Tara Parker-Pope and Anahad O’Connor at the NYTimes:

A surprising new study challenged decades of nutrition advice and gave consumers the green light to eat more red and processed meat. But what the study didn’t say is that its lead author has past research ties to the meat and food industry.

The new report, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, stunned scientists and public health officials because it contradicted longstanding nutrition guidelines about limiting consumption of red and processed meats.

[…]

Dr. Johnston also indicated on a disclosure form that he did not have any conflicts of interest to report during the past three years. But as recently as December 2016 he was the senior author on a similar study that tried to discredit international health guidelines advising people to eat less sugar. That study, which also appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, or ILSI, an industry trade group largely supported by agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical companies and whose members have included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cargill, one of the largest beef processors in North America. The industry group, founded by a top Coca-Cola executive four decades ago, has long been accused by the World Health Organization and others of trying to undermine public health recommendations to advance the interests of its corporate members.

Classic.

✏️ by C. W. Moss