Food pairing: Frankenstein cooking?

Some food pairings speak for themselves. I ask you, who is going to squirt chocolate sauce on beef? And do it so that you’d want to eat it? Okay, Heston Blumenthal may and he’s certainly proved that blue cheese matches with chocolate. This useful site of foodpairing trees offers some pretty whacky combinations. Like I said it’s useful although many of the pairings I expect should be avoided.

ACCC food price investigation begins

So we all know food prices are up. And it will get worse, rising perhaps by 50 per cent over the next five years. But how bad is it?

Today The ACCC Inquiry into food prices began and all submissions can be found on its site here.
The Victorian Farmers Federation’s submission is revealing:

“These increases in food prices, sometimes referred to as ‘ag-flation’, are going to change the world as we know it. Over the last 12 months, vegetable prices have risen 21.5%, cheese by 8.5%, bread 7.9% and milk prices up 5%.
Growers have informed the VFF that there is a mark up of around 120 per cent on farmgate prices for vegetables; while lettuces fetch between $1.00 and $1.20 at the farmgate, they were retailing at $2.78 in supermarkets this week; parsnips attract $50 per 10 kg box at the farmgate, but retail at $9.99 per kg which equates to $100 per 10 kg box, or a 100 per cent mark up.
Growers are price takers and not price setters. Transparency, competition and fairness through the supply chain must be addressed, in order to ensure that the farm sector, as price takers, does not incur the major impacts of any price reductions at the retail end of the chain.
The price of bread has risen up to 70 cents a loaf in the past twelve months. However, only 14 per cent of this is accountable to higher grain costs. The remaining 86 per cent is the costs of marketers, flour millers, bakers and transporters.
Calculations on additional returns to wheat growers from these price rises only amount to around 10 per cent of the 70 cent rise per loaf, much of which have been reduced through increased farm input costs such as fertiliser, fuel and herbicide. Clearly the drought is not to blame for the price rises.
According to the ABS, the retail price of milk rose over the period December 2006 to December 2007, while the price of beef and lamb remained unchanged. However, the ABARE measure of farm gate prices from July 2006 to July 2007 recorded no change for milk and a 10 per cent and 11 per cent reduction in the price of beef and lamb respectively.”

The food crisis is a global one, a global food catastrophe some say that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen.

“The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto recently, according to the Financial Post:

“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.
“The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it’s getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we’ve got to expand food output dramatically,” he said.