P i s t a c h i o

Kudos to John Papaloukas.

He’s a pizza seller in Victoria, BC, and he’d had it with the province’s ministry of education, which classifies pizza as junk food, and therefore deems it unwelcome in the schools for lunch.

“This whole notion of pizza not being healthy is a crock, at least not at our business,” he told the National Post last week, and to prove it, he had his pizzas analyzed by a lab.

Result: his pizzas passed with flying colours, and Papaloukas is selling his pizza to local high school cafeterias.

There’s our proof that not all pizzas are created alike.

Still, if you’re putting good tomato sauce on whole-wheat dough, and then topping it with fresh vegetables, good quality meat and cheese, what’s there to offend?  Hello happy food groups.

How did we go wrong with pizza?

It’s not the food; it’s the eating.

Finally wrapped it up, the largest piece of business journalism I’ve tackled to date: 4500 words on the new provincial budgets and what they’re offering to restaurateurs and operators across the country.

It was a great assignment, a lot to chew on and plenty of opinionated industry people to quote.

Here they are.

A scintillating read.

Really.

Pacific-Prairie Edition

Ontario Edition

Atlantic Edition

Hello Restaurant News

At the close of the Food Summit in Rome last week, observers weighed in on what was essentially sad news: the best 181 delegate countries could agree on was further study of biofuel’s impact on an international food crisis.

The summit’s final declaration called for status quo on three fronts: continued farm subsidies, which will contribute to keeping the price of corn high, government-mandated biofuel content for gasoline and diesel, which keeps the demand in place, and import barriers, such as the one on Brazil’s sugar cane ethanol, which is a sweet alternative to corn, which makes it difficult to bring on stream in North America.

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Some numbers tell some stories …

From the Globe and Mail:

250% — The increase in American corn prices since 2006

3% — The portion of corn-price increases attributed to ethanol, says U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer

30% — Is more like it, says Washington’s International Food Policy Research Institute

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From the New York Times:

50% — The portion of biofuel [mainly American corn ethanol] accounting for the worldwide demand for food crops last year, according to the International Monetary Fund

37 — The number of countries in critical need of food assistance right now