What’s more, if you’re willing to pony up $2,500 and become a Patron, you not only help underwrite the event but also receive a special package as a thank-you. This package includes dinner with Alice Waters, and VIP access to all areas of the event.

If that’s too steep, there’s also a $125 option to have lunch with Alice Waters. However, this event is a fund-raiser for the Slow Food Nation ‘08 event, and is being held on August 9.

Using a curriculum developed in partnership with the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, the Rouxbe cooking school begins with foundational lessons on kitchen equipment, knives, and techniques and terminology. Having completed those courses, a wide range of courses will cover everything from sauces to legumes, eggs to pork, and custards to cakes.

There are a few more details in a blog post over on the Rouxbe blog.

I’d always taken to heart the X glasses of water a day rule (even if I didn’t follow it) and I suppose it comes as no surprise that, having never investigated the origin of the rule, there’s more to the story than a simple equation.

Why do you think that water in single-serving sizes became so popular?

Marketers hammered home this idea that we need to stay hydrated, and we need to drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. If it was so important to drink all that, then portability became important.

It turns out there is no scientific basis for that eight by eight rule.

Where did that idea come from?

It got its start when the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council put out a report sometime in the ‘40s that said adults should drink about a milliliter of water for each calorie of food, which meant that we should drink about 64 to 80 ounces a day.

But the next sentence in the report was ignored. It says, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” When you think about pasta or rice, you know that it absorbs an enormous amount of water. And we get water in coffee and in beer and in soda, and all the other things that we drink. But it was easy to ignore that part of it, if you were selling water.

Santi Santamaría, one of the country’s most prominent chefs, has directed bruising public attacks at his avant-garde counterparts, accusing them of producing pretentious food they would not eat themselves — and potentially poisoning diners with chemicals that he says have no place in the kitchen.

Generally, we’ve seen a shift over the years from the more intuitive approach to food and food knowledge, towards a more “scientific” approach which attempts to look at the fundamental components of food to better understand how it works. We can thank this process for the nutritional information labels on packaged food, for example. It’s clear from this article (if it wasn’t before) that we have a long way to go before we develop a sophisticated scientific understanding. But, it is of course hard to make a strict comparison between this kind of approach and the food knowledge developed over thousands of years of evolution.

What’s interesting to me is where we draw the line: can we trust our bodies and internal mechanisms to direct our food consumption in a healthy way, or must we rely on external systems and methods of assessment to direct our eating habits? Perhaps the external, scientific tools are needed to combat the industrialized food system, which is explicitly designed to exploit or override many of our internal processes (such as our predilection for sweet foods). As a designer, it would be nice to see whether we can develop ways to nurture these more intuitive approaches rather than continue to support more scientific, industrialized food consumption habits.

(To be clear, I don’t have a problem with analyzing food and developing a better understanding of how we can pursue more systematic approaches to nutrition. However, I have a problem with using a single approach to understanding nutrition, especially one which purports to have all the answers and then still has trouble recommending whether it’s better to boil carrots or eat them raw.)

FoodCamp: The description’s in Italian, and the event itself is in Italy, but it looks like there’s a BarCamp for food, wine, the internet, and big and small distribution of food.

A New York Times article (Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World) describes how the transportation of food has traditionally not been taxed. Now, the European Union has announced it will begin to taxed under an emissions trading program by 2012. The goal is to have the price of food reflect the true cost of shipment. In other words, kiwi fruits available in New York City in the middle of winter should reflect their transportation realities.

Take a Bite plunges into the heart of the [climate change] debate with a powerful message: If we are serious about the crisis, we’ve got to talk about food.

With nearly one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from the food and agriculture sector, we at Take a Bite are here to help you learn about the connection between global warming and the food on your plate and what you can do about it.

“A list was made of 250 food products each with their major flavour components. By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made. The way to use is, is just to select a food product like strawberries. You will get a plot where you have strawberry in the middle surrounded by other food products. Take one of those other food products and try to make a new recipe by combining those two. The more flavours food products have in common the shorter the distance between the food products.”

Really interesting project

I also find it interesting how the NYTimes article portrays the situation, especially knowing now what I’ve learned from reading those aforementioned books. Questions about how it’s possible for outbreaks of e.coli to become more frequent (it’s the stomach acid of cows fed corn diets) and general food safety (_Fast Food Nation_ will clear that one up) seem almost…not childish…but ignorant. This is not to pass judgement on the writer, but mentioned more as a realization of how little causal information is actually passed along through news articles: the reporting of the incident is filed as expected, but there is no deeper understanding of the issues and therefore no ability to assure or provide context.

I certainly do not feel assured by the FDA’s response to this matter, which, to paraphrase, amounts to “the meat isn’t dangerous because it’s already been eaten.” And I’m sure other people who aren’t as well read on food issues probably feel disconcerted or perhaps shocked by the footage and may not exactly feel confident in the FDA’s reaction either.

Time will tell if this is a seminal moment in society’s awareness of the roots of its food chain. Juxtaposing the sick cows being lifted with forklifts with the ground beef being packaged sure drove the point home to me. I think it is in some way the same realization that Michael Pollan had while slaughtering chickens, that the sanitized version of the beef patty or packaged chicken has its origins in a living animal. To often we forget this, and I could definitely see such footage either converting people into vegetarians or making them pickier about their food choices.