Thursday, February 18, 2010

Sex in the Seedy

This past summer I got to watch a great food documentary titled Food, Inc. Like most food documentaries, it's going to show you the nitty gritty of food processing. But there was one part of the movie that intrigued me the most, copyrighted soybeans. Yeah! You read it right! Copyrighted Soybeans. The fascination led me to do some research on the internet. (By the way, that's how most of my internet adventures begin.) While researching I came across these graphs. What the graphs basically show is what company owns what seed.

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This one just explains the connections between private brands.
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Amazing right? If you would like to see the bigger illustrations just go to this website: https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicindustry.html

And to close off, here's a song dedicated to Alex Molina.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Sneak Peek

Here's the story that VOICES Inc. is going to help me publish. I finished it today.

Home-Cooked Gourmet
By Hector Mendoza

Fine dining. Two words that I have grunted at for most of my life. I thought that only rich, snobby people and cool college graduates went to “fine dining” restaurants. I never fit into any of those categories, so just the simple fact that fine dining has never been accessible to me gave me a reason to dislike it. But I have always loved food, and have always believed that eating fine food shouldn’t mean compromising my eating beliefs: in delicious, satisfying, home cooked meals.

It seems like I’m always hearing chefs on the Food Network say, “My mom used to make this” or “This is my mother’s secret recipe.” So I set out on an experiment to see if I could find any stereotypical “fine dining” chefs in Tucson who also believe that quality doesn’t have to mean giving up your roots.

Recently, I drove to Jax Kitchen to talk to the owner, Brian Metzger, and the chef, Casey McQueen. I was curious: could it true that fine dining can be connected to our mothers’ home-cooked meals?

When I walked in the front door at Jax Kitchen, I immediately spotted Brian juggling orders and polishing glasses behind the bar. Funny, it was an hour before dinnertime and the restaurant was already running at 100 miles per hour. I introduced myself as a young journalist who’s interested in fine dining but who has never met a chef.

I followed Brian into the kitchen where I asked Chef Casey how he expects costumers to react when they dig in into their first bite of food. According to Casey, sometimes things that are simple can intrigue customers the most—dishes that customers are the most familiar seem to be the most enjoyable. “I’ve had applesauce a thousand times, but how do they do this?” Casey mimicked to me. This made sense: when I eat something I’m comfortable with, I’m more able to critique it. Before I went to Jax Kitchen, I didn’t expect that I could stay in my comfort zone and experience something amazing. In Jax Kitchen’s dining room, there was no “oh, it looks so pretty!” Casey doesn’t want customers to remark on the elegance of the applesauce, he wants them to simply taste it. “It’s not rocket science,” Casey says with a smirk.

Brian explains the mission of Jax Kitchen as a place where people can be themselves. “Come dressed as if you’re going to a part at our house,” he says. Thinking back, I was probably a little over-dressed in my tucked-in button-up shirt and slacks. Brian stresses the fact that there is a sense of togetherness in the restaurant, almost as if it were simply a family dinner.

From now on, I’m looking forward to just enjoying any “fine” food I get to eat, rather than worry about how much it cost or feeling guilty about the time it takes to appreciate it. For example, in my family we get to decide wherever we want to go eat for our birthdays. We don’t do presents, we simply get dressed and do what we love, which for us, is eat. For my next birthday, as I await my fancy smoked gouda macaroni and cheese, I’m going to know that I already have everything it requires to appreciate fine dining.
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Reading the newspaper with my dad when I was little seemed to pay off. I can consider myself an amateur journalist.