America’s dairy industry has done it again—we’ve found ourselves with an insurmountable abundance of cheese. Thankfully, we have the government to take care of it.

Three days ago, the USDA announced that it would buy $20 million worth of cheese from dairy farmers to give to food banks and pantries. As reported in NPR’s The Salt, this is good for both food banks and dairy farmers. For the former, cheese is a popular product ironically in short supply; for the latter, it has more to do with tackling the global overabundance of cheese, which has been hurting their milk production.

“Dairy farmers were happy, too, hoping that this government purchase would help relieve what headlines trumpeted as a mountain of cheese that has been driving down the price they get for their milk,” the article reads.

While the current-day surplus is a result of dairy farmers upping their cheese production two years ago in response to soaring prices, and then sales dropping out of nowhere in two countries that aren’t small by any means (China and Russia), the world has never been very good at managing the dairy industry. Starting in the 1930s, the U.S. government began stockpiling milk and cheese to support programs for dairy farmers, and by the 1970s, there were .4 billion pounds of cheese in storage; in the 1980s, that amount rocketed up to 1.2 billion pounds, which isn’t far off from the current 1.3 billion pounds in storage today.

So how will this new announcement help tackle the surplus? While $20 million is no small amount of money, the government’s purchase will take care of less than one percent of the 1.3 billion pounds of cheese in storage. As for the high milk prices that the world is seeing, the NPR article reports that we won’t likely see a drop. So while the USDA’s move is bold and noble, and any action counts, it won’t chip too much off the world’s massive mountain of cheese.

At least it tastes good—NPR guesses that the majority of it is cheddar and mozzarella, America’s two beloved favorites.

The post American Dairy Farmers Have Produced More Cheese Than We Can Consume appeared first on Saveur.

More than a precious commodity of penny-pinching college students, instant ramen has become a valuable currency in another close living quarter with bunk-beds and communal bathrooms: U.S. prisons.

This discovery, published in an article in The Guardian yesterday, are the findings of Michael Gibson-Light, a PhD candidate in the University of Arizona’s school of sociology. During a one-year time period, Gibson-Light interviewed about 60 inmates at an undisclosed state prison during a study about prison labor, soon discovering that the previously top “currency,” tobacco, was now subordinate to blocks of instant noodles. Or, in the prison where he did the majority of his research, the 59-cent meal was simply called “soup.”

“[Ramen] is easy to get and it’s high in calories,” Gibson-Light says in the article. “A lot of them, they spend their days working and exercising and they don’t have enough energy to do these things.”

Much of ramen’s recent popularity stems from the lack of food (and poor quality of the little that is available) at U.S. prisons, where food simply has to be passable. Cited in the article, one pack of ramen can get you two five hand-rolled cigarettes—a $2 value—and five packs can get you an $11 sweatshirt. For some inmates, the packs of noodles are best exchanged for other stolen vegetables from the kitchen.

That last ramen-for-vegetable exchange that highlights a root issue: the food the justice system provides to inmates often fails to truly nourish them. For a first-hand account of how this plays out, look no further than the cookbook Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars, written by Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez, a former convict, dedicated solely to doctoring up ramen noodles to make his meals varied while in prison.

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When Brittani Farrington volunteered to help throw a welcome dinner for a handful of displaced families from Syria in Hamilton, Ontario, she intended on preparing the food—until three of the refugees asked if they could do the cooking instead.

Rawa’a, Dalal, and Manahel, three women who had resettled in Canada a few months before, knew they couldn’t communicate in English, but they could introduce themselves with their pillowy homemade pitas and mutabal, a yogurt-thickened cousin of baba ghannoush. Moved by the meal, Farrington opened up Google Translate to communicate with the women, and she slowly gleaned that they were interested in selling their food. So in July, she created a Kickstarter to fund Karam Kitchen, a catering business run by the women, and set a goal of just over $4,900 USD to cover the bare-minimum basics. Start date: July 24, with 30 days to reach full funding.

Little did Farrington expect to see the project nearly half-funded in the first 24 hours, and fully funded in just four days.

“The women were so excited [when I told them it was funded], though they were much more excited about being on the front page of The Hamilton Spectator,” Farrington says. “They felt like they were famous.”

Marketed as a catering company that “seeks to empower Syrian newcomers to build a new life in Hamilton and contribute to [the city’s] vibrant community,” Karam, which translates to generosity in Arabic, currently has over twice the amount of money it projected as a goal and nearly 200 backers—and there’s still a week left. With help from business partner and co-founder Kim Kralt, who has catering experience and a degree in social work, Farrington has lead the women through all the necessary steps, like earning their food handlers’ certification, and the more exciting tasks, like creating their standard catering menu.

Kralt found herself running around the kitchen, scrambling to keep up with the women who cooked each dish by feel. After finally convincing the women to measure how many cups of yogurt went into their smoky mutabal recipe before mixing, she and the team settled on a menu with both recognizable dishes to locals, such as tabouleh and hummus, and others that are less so, like meat- and rice-stuffed eggplant and zucchini. Their first official catering gig is September 8th for a meeting of the city’s Task Force on Refugee Resettlement, a group of 25 to 30 people who have supported Karam Kitchen from the start. From there, Karam already has a few packed months ahead. It’s an impressive schedule for any catering business, let alone one that’s only half a year old—and to say nothing of the language barrier.

Just as Rawa’a, Dalal, and Manahel were new to Hamilton, a Canadian port city with a population of half a million, so was Farrington. Born in the Midwest, where she went to college and gained experience doing marketing for catering companies, she found herself uprooted a year ago to Ontario for her husband’s PhD program. Well aware of United States’ shaky reception of Syrian refugees, Farrington was shocked to find herself in a city with a global department dedicated to making the city welcoming to refugees, and with a large task force behind it. In the past year, Hamilton alone has welcomed 1,000 displaced Syrians.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in March 2011, the U.N. estimates that nearly 13.5 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian aid, and more than 50% of the population is displaced—but only 3.6% of those who are displaced have resettled in another country.

While the U.S. hasn’t been that receptive to Syria’s refugees, our neighbors north of the border have proven to be especially welcoming. In the past few months, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran features on Canada’s programs. According to Global Affairs Canada, the governmental department that manages the country’s diplomatic relations, Canada has taken in over 25,000 refugees since November 2015 and has spent over $1 billion in “humanitarian, development, and security assistance.”

“It’s been so refreshing here in Canada to be living in a city that is generally incredibly welcoming to refugees,” Farrington says, emphasizing that though displaced persons are obviously grateful to be welcomed in foreign countries, leaving their home is bittersweet. “Rawa’a, Dalal, and Manahel were always serving me cookies and tea [when I visited their homes], despite their limited resources, so I’ve been so pleased to see the city rally around newcomers.”

Now that Karam has exceeded its $4,900 USD goal, they’re hoping to reach just over $11,600 by August 24th, an amount that will allow them to purchase more equipment and packaging, as well as fulfill all rewards for Kickstarter donors. But beyond supporting the women, Farrington stands behind the food; she doesn’t want people supporting Karam solely because of the cause, but also because she believes in the crisp-fried falafel, the savory-sweet cabbage and pomegranate salad, and every other dish on their menu.

“We believe so strongly in the women, which might be why someone initially orders from us,” Farrington says, “but it’s such quality food that we feel confident that if we can get people to try it, they’ll be hooked.”

Read more stories from Ladies First, a column about people doing amazing things in the food world who happen to be women »

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Much of the coverage about Rio de Janeiro’s food supply during the Olympics has focused on the country’s water crisis and food shortages, issues that have only been aggravated as thousands of tourists and athletes flood into metropolis and put more pressure on the food industry. According to an article in The Guardian, though, one underdog sector of the city’s hospitality industry has really stepped (or drove) up to help satiate hungry stomachs with freshly fried frites and meat- and cheese-oozing tapioca flour crêpes: food trucks.

While Brazil’s food supply issues extend to a time far before the start of the Olympics, the current flare-up in Rio stemmed from official food catering facilities falling through the first few days of the 2016 Olympic games. Prices were high and lines were long, and people went quickly from hungry to hangry, which is when Rio asked its food trucks to drive in and give these people some cheap, cheesy, carby things they can buy for a few reals and eat with their hands. In a country with a rapidly developing food truck scene, the cooks were able to alleviate the pressure and deal out dishes more quickly than catering businesses.

“Food trucks are more experienced in these critical situations of serving a lot of people in a very short space of time,” food truck owner Fernando Modenesi is cited as saying in the article.

It’s been a boon for the trucks, especially considering Brazil hasn’t given owners an especially easy time. While big cities, including São Paulo, started to see the rise of food truck movement as early as 2008 when Roy Choi’s Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles started, Rio didn’t jump on the bandwagon until 2014. Since then, the number of trucks has grown to 150, but due to struggles with “hostile petitions in snobby neighbourhoods, fickle consumer demand and unhelpful regulations,” according to the Guardian article, the sector has struggled to find its footing.

However, with their new-found responsibilities during the Olympics, food trucks owners and supporters are hopeful that Rio may be more receptive of them in the future.

“I hope this experience with the Olympics can open the eyes of the authorities to the importance of this sector for the city,” Roberta Sudbrack, a prominent restaurateur and food truck supporter, is quoted as saying in the article.

The post In a Surprise Move, Food Trucks Are Now Feeding the Olympics appeared first on Saveur.

Calcium-rich, helpful in forming both thick mustaches and strong bones, and tasty enough to be the namesake ingredient in cake, milk was our parents’ and doctors’ favorite daily prescribed drink. But today the price of milk spikes and plummets wildly, and the reason why isn’t just a matter of decreased demand for a tall glass of the cold stuff. In an article on NPR’s The Salt, the site’s food and agriculture correspondent helps decode the mysteries of milk’s fluctuating prices by comparing it to a liquid that pairs far less well with cookies: oil. The kind that powers cars.

Just like oil, the global demand for “crude” milk is less to consume it as a drink and more about refining it into products like cheese, yogurt, milk powder, cream, or powdered whey. Each of those products requires a lot of milk to make a little refined dairy, and what’s more, they’re traded in a global marketplace. So when a milk-producing country is facing issues, political or economic, or they simply change the amount they supply, they shake up the entire milk world, and American dairy farmers suffer.

For example, the European Union recently got rid of a required milk quota for its dairy farmers, and Russia isn’t buying as much European cheese as it used to, thanks to 2014 economic sanctions—two unrelated factors with undeniable effects on the milk trade.

“It’s a global phenomenon,” Jerry Cessa, the milk expert at the USDA’s Economic Research Service, is quoted in the article.

On top of the global dairy industrial complex, people just don’t drink it in the United States like they used to. Just as is the case with orange juice, Big Dairy (and Big Juice companies) used to convince Americans to drink milk (and juice) to support their businesses or industries, convincing us that we needed it for our health—and in reality, we don’t. That, and in a time where you can drink milk made out of anything (truly), why slurp it from a cow?

As for what this means for the dairy industry, it’s unclear; milk producers are affected differently, depending on a multitude of variables, so there’s no one clear solution to stabilize the business. The USDA has created a program in which dairy farmers can enroll to protect themselves from losing too much money, known as the Dairy Margin Protection Program, but there are no released numbers on enrollment rates. And, in the past few weeks, milk prices have even gone up, according to the article. The price of milk has been low as of late, but for all dairy industry specialists know, the milk crisis could be easing.

Really, the main takeaway is this: Don’t ever confuse milk and oil, but perhaps use the latter to help understand the former.

The post If You Want to Understand the Price of Milk, Think of It Like Gasoline appeared first on Saveur.

When Americans talk about African food, the discussion is usually about food security—recognition of food shortage issues in parts of the continent. Left out of that discussion is African food as cuisine, not just sustenance, but food to be explored and celebrated. Which is exactly the goal of Grace Odogbili, a New York-based chef and caterer introducing New Yorkers not just the food culture of her Nigerian roots, but to cuisines across Africa.

As Odogbili has watched Thai, Indian, and other cuisines rise in America, she’s stood firmly behind her own as a caterer and event host, acting as what can only be described as an ambassador of African food. And as one of the few people chosen to participate in New York City’s first-ever African Food Festival August 13th and 14th, she’ll be there as the event’s rising chef, serving dishes that reflect traditional African food while showing their place in the modern world.

“People are always excited to try new cuisines because the ones that were new eight years ago aren’t new anymore, so [African food] is new territory,” Odogbili says. “I want to create a platform for it to be seen in a more positive light instead of just as sustenance food.”

As the chef and founder behind Dining with Grace, a pan-African catering company that also offers nutrition and African food history classes, Odogbili passes her days not only stirring fufu and mashing plantains for mofongo, but also researching the foodways of the African diaspora. Born in south Brooklyn to Nigerian parents, she didn’t grow up fully aware of what it meant to be a Nigerian-American; while she ate her fair share of her mother’s cornmeal fufu, a staple at any Nigerian meal, she actually cooked much of her family’s dinners. And as a young kid who just wanted to eat what all the other kids were eating, she’d throw together lasagnas and dishes she’d watch TV chefs prepare.

“One of the first dishes I made was angel hair pasta in an Asian style, when all we were eating was African dishes,” Odogbili says, laughing.

But seven years ago, after losing her job at an investment bank during the Great Recession, she decided to follow an old dream and cook for a living. A few months after she was let go, she started Dining with Grace as a cake catering business, as she knew that was a paved route that seemed successful. But after having spent years doing work she didn’t love, she was finally following her dreams and reevaluating her a life, which led to her curiosity about her roots.

She started spending hours in libraries around Brooklyn, poring over books about African cuisine, discovering that not only she had so much to learn, but that she also was in a position to share that knowledge with a wider audience. She quickly realized that not only had African cooking been influenced by Portugal, France, and countries around the world, but that African cuisines have critically shaped the cuisines of the Caribbean, Americas, and elsewhere.

Now she shares those insights with people from all over New York, whether she’s preparing a banquet for local homeless shelters (her passion project) taking a small group of eaters to Martinique so they can discover Africa’s roots in their food culture together. Ask her to cater an event or attend one of her African Table dinner pop-ups and she’ll bring out bowls of creamy West African peanut stew, spiced with ginger and chiles that cut through the richness, and the customer favorite jollof rice, vibrant red from tomatoes and chiles. Or let her argue African food’s place in the America’s modern food landscape and she’ll made beignets with the Caribbean’s staple salt cod, or take classics like Nigerian egusi soup, a savory stew thickened with ground squash seeds, and put it in a wonton with shrimp and spinach.

“Nigerians will eat it and go, ‘how’d you put ugusi in a wonton?'” Odogbili says. But that’s the reaction she expects: she knows people, African or not, don’t expect to see pan-African cuisine interpreted in a new, untraditional way.

And at the African Food Festival, Odogbili will do just that. On Saturday, she’ll host a vegan brunch that introduces diners to foods of Africa and the Caribbean, adding Cajun spices to jackfruit and turning cassava root into hash, showing the depth and range of these underappreciated ingredients. And just two hours later, she’ll serve a five-course dinner of pan-African foods, taking traditional dishes and presenting them in a fine-dining environment, such as turning curried goat into delicate ravioli. She realizes she probably can’t get New Yorkers to want a Nigerian take out restaurant on every corner, but if she can get people talking about African food as a cuisine to celebrate and explore, she’ll consider it a victory.

“When I first started, I was one of the first young women trying to elevate [African food] and make it modern,” Odogbili says. “I still constantly have to explain [pan-African] food, but I think people are excited.”

Read more stories from Ladies First, a column about people doing amazing things in the food world who happen to be women »

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It’s that time of the year we start rhapsodizing about the end of the summer, and, more importantly, smoosh all our favorite stone fruits between buttery layers of dough and baking a juicy fruit pie. But if you have your heart set on peaches, you may be out of luck, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

After what Northeast farmers refer to as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” when sub-zero temperatures killed the buds on peach trees around February 14th, New Jersey and southern New York lost much of their crop, while other parts of New England and the Hudson Valley lost everything. Every August, central Connecticut celebrates the Lyman Orchards Peach Festival; this year, it’s been renamed Corn Fest, because there are no peaches to be festive about.

But if you’re into blueberries, you’re in luck. MLIVE.com reports that 2016 is seeing a potentially record-breaking harvest. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Michigan picked our largest crop ever,” Mike DeGrandchamp, owner of DeGrandchamp Farms, is quoted in the MLive.com article, but the blueberry abundance isn’t localized to just one state or one type of blueberry. Maine is also seeing an over-supply of their signature wild blueberries—so much that the USDA is stepping in to buy nearly $4.4 million of the excess berries from the industry.

The balance between cultivated and wild blueberries is an interesting one; when one is in higher demand, the other tends to suffer. Ironically, Michigan leads the country in cultivated blueberry production, and Maine in wild blueberry production, pulling in a harvest of over 100 million pounds the past few years.

So if you find yourself at the market, maybe pick up a few more cartons of blueberries than you normally would—they’ll probably be cheaper than most other years, and they make a great hand pie with nectarines to fill the peach-shaped hole in your heart.

The post America is Suffering From a Painful Shortage of Peaches, But at Least There’s a Blueberry Glut appeared first on Saveur.

In nearly 14 years, Mexico City’s pollution is at an all-time high, according to an April 2016 article in Bloomberg—a worrisome statistic in a city with nearly 8.9 million people. But in a novel move, locals are addressing the problem head-on in a way that directly benefits them. In an interesting role reversal, the answer starts with trash and ends with fresh food.

As reported in an article on CCTV America, residents of Mexico City have been frequenting the Mercado de Trueque (Barter Market) with bags full of trash to exchange for fresh fruits, vegetables, and plants—and they’ve kept it up for nearly five years.

It all started in 2011 when the city’s Bordo Poniente landfill closed, pushing the government to respond to the looming waste disposal issue. And while the initiative is aimed at curbing the city’s pollution, according to the article, it also helps clean up the area and get fresh, healthy food to locals.

“I see kids who just leave their trash on the streets, we recycle this to help the environment and also because we get lettuce, tortilla that helps our family eat,” says Urile Matla, an 11-year-old who was interviewed while bringing trash to the market.

According to the city government, the neighborhood program recycled 1,400 pounds of trash in 2015. However, in a city that generates 86 tons a day, it’s only a small step toward becoming a more environmentally sustainable city. Perhaps a citywide recycling plan can be next.

CCTV America highlights the biggest takeaway: “The success of the barter program shows there is a hunger and a demand from in its citizens for a cleaner future.”

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If “bee” is in an article headline these days, the ensuing paragraphs are likely bad: that populations are in decline, that Colony Collapse Disorder is a growing threat, and that without bees pollinating the world’s food supply, our food system is in jeopardy. But those problems don’t refer to all bees—just honey bees. And while we’re still looking for answers as to how to save our honey-producing pals, two food writers and apian activists think we’re focusing too much on the honey bee when there’s another specie of bee out there that can alleviate the stress on our food system. In an interview on Civil Eats, Jill Lightner and Dave Hunter introduced readers to what they believe could be a bee of the future: the mason bee.

With Hunter’s experience as founder of the Orchard Bee Association and owner of Crown Bee, a company dedicated to helping people raise mason bees, he and Lightner co-wrote Mason Bee Revolution: How the Hardest Working Bee Can Save the World One Backyard at a Time. Aside from us loving them for the natural sugar they produce, honey bees pollinate one third of the world’s food supply, making them an integral part of our food system. According to an article in the Washington Post, “The honeybee population in the United States is now less than half of what it was at the end of World War II,” which is largely due Colony Collapse Disorder and industrial farming practices. The situation is so dire that in June 2014, President Obama established the Pollinator Health Task Force to dedicate federal efforts to curbing the loss of pollinators.

Which is why Lightner and Hunter argue the world needs to pay attention to the mason bee. They’re solitary (which means no costly hives to maintain), easy-to-raise, more productive at pollinating than honeybees, not aggressive, and resilient to Colony Collapse Disorder. In other words, they’re the bee that we need. More than six years ago, Gizmag reported on how we need to pay more attention to the mason bee; in other words, this is no new news. But what is news is that the honeybee population has only declined since 2010, and we’re still not paying attention to the mason bee. Their main downside is that they don’t produce honey, but considering all their advantages, we can live with that.

Even if it isn’t the “unsung bee that has the potential to save the planet” that Lightner and Hunter believe it to be, we’ll take all the help we can get.

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Over a third of the global population depends on rice as their staple food, and around the world we cultivate more than 140,000 varieties of the grain, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It’s hard to overstate the crop’s importance to us all, but for all that we rely on rice, we’re a little lacking on the details of its origins. For the first time ever, a group of scientists were able to extract DNA from 2,800-year-old grains of rice to compare it to 200-plus modern varieties of rice from around the world, as reported in a recent article on Phys.org. Among the findings: rice may not have told the truth about where it came from.

Despite those 140,000 rice varieties, 90% of the planet’s harvest comes from merely two domesticated kinds: japonica and indica. Before this study, researchers believed that japonica rice—the short grain variety used in sushi—had been exclusively produced in the northern part of China, Japan, and Korea, and indica—made of longer grains that fluff up for pilaf and biryani—had come from tropical parts of the Asian continent. But after scientists extracted DNA from those ancient grains of rice uncovered in seven archaeological sites in Korea and Japan, they found indica’s sticky DNA.

“The research team has now found, for the first time, the presence of both japonica- and indica-type varieties in the Yayoi period and the middle ages of Japan and the middle part of Korean Peninsula 2000 years ago,” the article reads. “Together with the finding of rice variety in Korean Peninsula, the indica variety also contributed to the dietary of people living in archaic East Asia of more than two thousand years ago.”

The scientists are still unsure as to whether the western part of the Korean peninsula was cultivating indica rice more than 2,000 years ago, or if China brought the rice over during the Han Empire. What they do know now, though, is that ancient East Asians weren’t just eating japonica rice. They likely lived on a wide variety of rice cultivars, including longer-grain indica, which eventually fell victim to the homogenizing forces of domestication. Had those varieties lived on, it’s possible, given their different culinary specialties, that they would have impacted those regions’ cuisines in some surprising ways.

And if you need a reminder that knowledge is power: all of this information literally comes from a single grain of rice.

The post 2,800-Year-Old Rice Has Some Secrets to Tell appeared first on Saveur.

It might sound just like an awkward sex conversation between parents and children, but it turns out the birds and the bees have a more literal connection than we might think. An article from NPR’s The Salt reports on a new study that found that the African Greater honeyguide, a bird that has traditionally lead mankind to areas where honey is present, actually listens for human response to help guide them. As in in any relationship, communication is key.

The woman behind the study, published in the most recent issue of Science, is Claire Spottiswoode, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, who first learned about the honeyguide as a child in South Africa. And whereas scientist H. A. Isack had published a study about human interaction with honeyguides in 1989, also in Science, Spottiswoode wanted to know if there were specific human sounds that attracted or repelled the birds. Turns out, the birds listened for a specific call—no random shout or noise would do the trick. When hearing this call, the birds would be more response, and humans would be three times more likely to have a successful honey hunt. What’s perhaps most intriguing, though, is that there is no one specific call, as people all over the continent communicate with the bird differently.

“The new finding shows that honeyguides pay special attention not just to sounds made by humans, but specifically to the sounds that are designed by humans to attract honeyguides,” anthropologist Richard Wrangham is quoted as saying in the article.

So now that Wrangham and Spottiswoode know that honeyguides listen for a specific call, but that call is different all over Africa, they’re trying to answer their next question: The birds are not likely born knowing what call to listen for, so how have humans conditioned them over the years?

“The relationship is likely to be thousands, even millions of years old, but the relationship certainly has changed through space and time—involving different acoustic attractors and different forms of ‘repayment’ to honeyguides,” Wrangham says in the article.

Turns out, human-bird relationships aren’t so different from human-human ones. There’s no one mode of communication that works best for all relationships—it’s about learning what works best for yours.

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