Off The Road Round-Up

We're back in Memphis, but still catching up from being away for the weekend.  Luckily, the garden appears to be thriving despite the lack of rain since Friday.  We gave it a good dousing last night and I expect to see it once again standing at attention as the sun starts to rise this morning.

Across the web, there are several stopping places that grabbed my attention today.  Coffee and Conservation provides a handy list of five steps to knowing your coffee is sustainably grown.  Though not locally available per se, coffee is still a staple in our house.

Energy Bulletin has several recent headlines indicating that the explosive growth in demand for ethanol is about to drive food costs higher across the globe.  This isn't only happening with foods that depend directly upon corn, either (i.e. high fructose corn syrup).  Even Hershey is complaining, since dairy cows require that same corn for feed.  Maybe higher costs on processed foods will ignite the efforts around local foods and sustainability.

Groovy Green dispels concern about Colony Collapse Disorder and the fear of bee hives disappearing by noting that organic beekeepers aren't losing any hives.  Guess that counts out the whole cell-phone theory, huh?

Finally, the always interesting Tana Butler meditates on food movements with a long post, and questions the very idea:

This Slow Food event was, from what I could tell, the very thing that made me wish I could have been a fly on the wall, because then I would have been too tiny to run from the room screaming. Presented at the home of a trust-fund baby (scream #1), whose guests included only chefs, restaurateurs, the publisher of tony cookbooks, a food columnist or two from The Golden City to the North, and a man generally thought to be one of the most intelligent and important (and genuinely nice and down-to-earth, seemingly unimpressed with his own celebrity—a man from whom I would never run away screaming) food writers in the world, the menu was to include only recipes from Very Important Cookbooks Acknowledged by the Cognoscenti to be Time-Honored and Significant for Historical Reasons (scream #2). Justin pooh-poohed that, though: "I'm going there to do my thing, my way. I don't care about those old cookbooks. I don't need them to impress people."

And she takes on Petrini as well.  Thought-provoking ideas on what it means to live for food, as opposed to making it an ornament.

More tomorrow.  Great Monday to all.