P i s t a c h i o

Truth in packaging

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Thanks to Doug Tee for Tweeting this today.

Creative ideas like this really get me going. Architecture and design are already riding the container revolution. Restos are a natural application.

And the Economist announced today that Canada is only 14th among the world’s most innovative countries [thanks Sean Moffitt]. There’s got to be a miscalculation. Don’t get me started.

Logistics? Not worried. If the same brights are on it, no problem.

Here’s the Globe’s report.

Despite our best efforts, we failed.

– Michael McCain, Maple Leaf Foods President

In shirtsleeves, as if to say, “I’m a husband and father, and this could have happened to my family,” Michael McCain faced the camera to proffer his apology. He fearlessly took responsibility for the dead with a corporate “we,” but his countenance was distinctly “me.”

In a best-practices kind of way, he owned up promptly and almost immediately widened the recall territory, as if to tell us this was doubly horrific for him as it was for us.

Corporate humanity has to have a heart, because a microbe costs 12 lives and $20 million.

The innovative design of a grad school architect from the University of Waterloo got a lot of attention last month.

Gordon Graff and his Skyfarm design was given some international exposure by Davidson Despommier, the father of vertical farming, at the World Science Festival in New York City .

Despommier spoke on “Future Cities: Sustainable Solutions, Radical Designs,” and Graff’s piece illustrated the New York Times article that followed.

The third photo from the top is Graff’s uncredited building [a shame]. Here’s a better look thanks to Despommier’s design page from his site.

Vertical farming is the new tag for growing crops and raising livestock in urban areas, stacked skyscraper-style, where land is at a premium, and too many delivery trucks clog the streets. Graff’s Skyfarm gives new meaning to local food. He wants to dig his foundation in the financial district and raise his structure 58-storeys high.

I’ve always loved skyscrapers, even those aesthetically-challenged. Being in the sky is exciting, and approaching the city on a descent by plane or on the ground on a highway drive, the clustered metropolis ahead has always been a thrill.

I just adore a penthouse view, I guess.

The whole idea of vertical farming is more exciting than words can relay, and I’m going to expand on this story in the future, because I want to tell it and tell it again. There’s even a business case to relay.

But first, I wanted to put this out there.

Stephen Colbert had Despommier on as a guest that week, and apparently had some fun with him. As soon as I can locate the video, I’ll post.

Stay tuned for the joining of skyfarming and living in the same structure, and architectural lily-pads next week. Ever wanted to live on water, but not on a water vessel?

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

Répétez avec moi — BEN-YAY.

– your highschool French teacher

Starbucks has an economic self-rescue agenda in play.

Earlier this year, they tried a gourmet breakfast sandwich, which turned out to be a stinker, literally. It seems customers didn’t like the smell of cooked eggs while they waited to pick up their morning lattes. The sandwich is unceremoniously being pulled from stores as we speak.

Then came a return to grinding their beans in the store, an olfactory apology. Nice move.

Then, this week, a product strategist was quoted saying, “What goes better with coffee than a gourmet doughnut?”

They’re called beignets, people, if you want $2 a piece for them [and you do] and if you want to sell a lot of them [which I’m assuming is the whole point].

And here’s the touted descriptor for those gourmet doughnuts: “hand-forged.”

People! Get thee to a dictionary. Your crowd is educated. They’re going to get a heavy-metal connotation, an unfortunate leaden image that you really don’t want associated with your doughnut/beignet/thingy.

I’m going to say it: wake up and smell it.

Yesterday, an assignment came in from Foodservice & Hospitality Magazine. Managing Editor Alistair Kyte [great name] asked me to do a profile of a couple of chocolatiers in Richmond, BC. The mag is doing a roundup of the year’s most notable chefs.

Perfect. I love doing chef profiles. I wrote about a hundred of them for The Food Encyclopedia, published last fall.

Shameless bragging here. Two years ago, I spent eight months doing a line-edit of the Encyclopedia’s predecessor, The Cook’s Essential Dictionary, all 4,000 entries, including some of my own. There were a few biographies included, like Caréme, Escoffier, and as I was wrapping up my portion of that project, I started thinking about other greats similarly responsible for advancing modern cuisine. I asked the publisher what he thought about adding more culinary biographies for the second edition of the book, which was to become the Encyclopedia. He liked the idea, and the culinary biographies were born. My partner in writing about 150 biographies was food writer Judith Finlayson. Together we covered a gamut, from Alain Ducasse to  Margaret Visser, and more.

But back to those chocolate geniuses in Richmond. Cindy and Dominique Duby have  been called Atomic Chefs for their use of molecular gastronomy in making their highly original work. There’s literally no one doing this kind of work in sweets, although they do savoury as well. They’re also virtual entrepreneurs.

Coming soon, the profile in toto.

Finally.

Foodservice training specifically designed for English-as-a-Second-Language workers, a no-brainer that has been in the works at George Brown College for some time.

This academic year, ESL workers will be able to formalize their foodservice training in a course that deals directly with their communication skills.

“Visionary” is an apt moniker for Hospitaltiy School Dean John Walker.

“We’ve been listening to our customers,” says Walker, and in this case, the customer is the resto/foodservice sector screaming for trained labour.

There’s a lot of great immigrant labour available, with an outstanding work ethic and new lives to build, but if they can’t understand the directives or can’t advance once they’ve mastered their duties, no one wins.

Until now.

Nice work George Brown.

Read my news story for Ontario Restaurant News.