#5 | Tipping is inherently a really sexist, racist system
Everything you ever wanted to know about food poisoning
Good morning!
I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. You're getting this email because you subscribed. If you'd like to hop off at anytime, simply unsubscribe. I appreciate you reading this newsletter.
Welcome new subscribers! While we're working on the next Edible SF issue, we've curated a long, but definitely worthy list, of what we've been eating, drinking and thinking about.
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EAT
Everything you ever wanted to know about food poisoning (how's that for a lede). “People most commonly blame the last food they ate outside the home for food poisoning symptoms. Evidence is often lacking that they’re correct.”
Chris Cosentino's (Cockscomb) Roasted Casteltravano Olives with Cherry Tomatoes: Roasting Castelvetrano olives and cherry tomatoes along with tomato leaves brings out amazing flavor and aromas.
Nichole Accettola's (Kantine) Royal Party Cake: One of our favorite summer desserts, a white vanilla cake topped with a lavish spread of meringue and fresh strawberries.
Forks down, my favorite way of preparing summer squash is grilling. And this vibrantly colored, mouth-watering collard-peanut pesto adds a little flair to the dish. {More from Bryant Terry below in THINK👇}
To understand how bouillon achieved such international popularity, you have to consider the central role that broths and stocks have played in human history. Using water to stretch ingredients into a full, and filling, nutritious meal is a survival-based innovation that has come to define culinary traditions around the world.
DRINK
Notes on a green tea: We're pretty much a green tea drinker, and lean towards the vegetal freshness of Japanese senchas and the more floral than heavily roasted Chinese oolong teas. Pictured here is the Shincha, Yabukita 2020 from Tekuno, a small intimate tea shop we stumbled upon in the Dogpatch when heading to DIG Wine, which is just around the corner. This tea tastes of fresh cut grass, which makes it a perfect summer drinking tea, while Tekuno's label describes notes of ramps & frisée lettuce. We have a cupboard full of tea cups and mugs but made room for these enchanting hand-painted tea cups with the koi swimming inside. They're made in San Francisco by ceramicist Amber Feng and sold under her label Hello Made. We purchased them at Tekuno.
THINK
Bryant Terry on why playlists are important to his recipes: Wendell Berry has this quote about the need to put the culture back into agriculture. That’s been the big thrust of my own work: How can we bridge this chasm where industrial food has put food on one side, and on the other side all these things that have traditionally been connected to it like art, and culture, and music and community, and connection, and love, and caring? And so I see the playlists as a small way of helping to bridge that chasm. I know it’s not the only thing, but I think it is a step.
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experiences as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” With an impeccable blend of deadpan humor, candor and righteousness, Donovan critiques not only the rampant sexism in haute cuisine, but also the misogyny prevalent in our culture at large, not shying away from depicting her experiences of domestic partner abuse, rape and gender-based pay disparity.
“Everybody is having this big come-to-Jesus moment. . . The way we run our restaurants just left everybody so vulnerable, including ourselves—because we don’t charge enough for food and we don’t pay our employees more." Cohen (Dirt Candy) predicts that “there will be a much stronger movement to get rid of tipping” and to increase wages “across the board.”
Seen on Twitter:
One more from Amanda Cohen, this is where the money meets the road: Tipping is inherently a really sexist, racist system. To have your customer base paying half your employees’ wages — it doesn’t work for anybody.
While you're at it, help save restaurants! Sign on the dotted line: Tell Congress to pass the Restaurants Act now!
There's a map for that: Leah Douglas at the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN) has created a dashboard for tracking the spread of Covid-19 at meatpacking plants, food processing facilities, and farms.
As of July 31 at 12 pm ET, she reports confirmed cases:
38,641 meatpacking workers (10,104 from Tyson Foods alone)
7,314 food processing workers
5,498 farmworkers
Here’s what this looks like:
These places have a lot to answer for. This is an American tragedy.
-- Marion Nestle
Related: Coronavirus ravages California’s Central Valley, following a cruel and familiar path. “We hear about these huge outbreaks in meatpacking plants, in agriculture and these low-wage jobs, where people work side by side with other people in these very dense environments, stay-at-home orders do little for the low-wage essential workers that face the greatest risks.”
Last month, The Counter reported that American meatpackers had sold record amounts of pork and beef to China while simultaneously lobbying President Trump to issue an executive order that would permit their increasingly virus-stricken facilities to stay open in an effort to aid what they claimed was an American supply chain in extreme distress.
United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) then opened an investigation of Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Cargill and Smithfield Foods. “The Covid-19 pandemic has made it painfully clear that these giant meatpackers can use their power to exploit their workers for profit,” Warren said in a statement.
Then there's this: Consumer groups challenge “deceptive” Tyson ads that brag about worker safety.
LISTEN
“When we don’t own our media, we will not own our messages,” says Stephen Satterfield, the founder of the food culture magazine Whetstone, and one of the only Black owners of a major food publication. Listen to his conversation with Tom Philpott on the Mother Jones podcast: BITE.
🔥 EAT LOCAL IN SF 🔥
A five alarm fire destroyed a commercial kitchen space Tuesday morning on 14th Street shared by Eko Kitchen, Crepe Madame, Chilli Cali, Fulfilled Foods, and VeganBacon. Simileoluwa Adebajo, chef and owner of Eko Kitchen, SF's first and only Nigerian restaurant and catering company, has started a GoFundMe (to be split among the restaurants above) to help replace equipment and inventory destroyed by the blaze. Help if you can. More coverage from Mission Local.
“You don’t really hear about Black farming, especially in cities like San Francisco,” said Rheema Calloway, co-owner of Bayview catering business Vegan Hood Chefs. “This representation is filling a void that’s been missing for a while. It’s important to have folks that look like us educating people about gardening and creating spaces that are accessible to the community.”
ONE MORE THING
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Be well and take care,
–Bruce