Food Jargon of the Day: Traceability

Traceability
Web sites such as Find the Farmer, and special labels on the packages that let buyers learn about and even contact the farmers who produced their food. Courtesy of the NY Times. See The Oprah-ization of Food and Provenance of Food.

Food Jargon of the Day: Organic Junk Food/Vegan Junk Food

Organic Junk Food
Courtesy of Marion Nestle. Whether it's organic Oreos or regular Oreos: "Organic junk food is still junk food.”


Vegan Junk Food
(aka Vegan OK Junk Food )
Junk foods not made from any animal products nor animal by-products.

Food Jargon of The Day: Food Stamp Challenge

Food Stamp Challenge
Individuals who aren't on food stamps live on the allocation for their state for one month or one week. In 2007, in an effort to help raise hunger awareness, Oakland Congresswoman Barbara Lee took the “Food Stamp Challenge,” and lived on just $21 - or $3 per day - for one week. In a recent LA Times article, a journalist and his wife take the Food Stamp Challenge to save money to buy a house: "A couple takes the Food Stamp Challenge and discovers it is possible to eat healthfully on a tight budget. Careful planning and a home garden help." Right...

Food Jargon of the Day: The First Locavore

The First Locavore
New title given to Michelle Obama (formerly know as the "First Lady") after breaking ground for an organic garden at the White House.

Food Jargon of the Day: The Oprah-ization of Food

The Oprah-ization of Food

From an article in Advertising Age, "The Oprah-ization of Food" refers to the need for "our food to come with compelling stories." For example, Dole organic bananas are branded with a number you can enter on the company's website and find out to where it was picked and discover by whom. See food provenance.

Food Jargon of the Day: Edible Cocktails/Solid Cocktails

edible cocktails/solid cocktails
Cocktails that you eat instead of drink. According to an article in today's NY Times, solid cocktails offered by restaurants in NYC include a gelatinized Cuba Libre, a Ramos gin fizz marshmallow and a martini in the form of a pickle. Adult jello shots, anyone?

Food Jargon of the Day: Urban Gleaning

Urban Gleaning
Gleaning is the practice of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been mechanically harvested, or from fields that are not economically profitable to harvest. Urban gleaning is the practice of salvaging fruit from trees located in cities to provide low income residents with access to fresh fruit. For more information, checkout the Portland Fruit Tree Project, a gleaning initiative that organizes people in the Portland, Oregon to gather fruit before it falls, and make it available to those who need it most.

Food Jargon Watch: Imitation Edibles and In Vitro Meat

Imitation Edibles
All manner of fake food - from faux meats to near beer and liquid smoke. Mock foods seem to be the gastric meme of the moment with the current edition of VegNews focusing on faux meats, Emily Nunn's recent article in the Chicago Tribune on fake foods (from which the term "imitation edibles" is culled), and PETA's challenge to scientists to step up research into in vitro meats (see below).

In Vitro Meat
Laboratory produced meat "grown" from animal stem cells. In vitro meat is not yet a reality, but PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and make in vitro meat available to consumers. According to the PETA website, in vitro meat would enable the production of meat without killing any animals.

Food Jargon of the Day: Faux Meat

Faux Meat
Meat substitutes used by vegetarians and vegans. Some meat substitutes - tofu, seitan, tempeh - have been used by eastern cultures for eons, while others like tofurkey, meatless riblets, and vegan haggis are new additions to the vegetarian kitchen. Also known as "meat analog" and "mock meat."

Food Jargon of the Day: Cookzine

cookzine
Self-published, do-it-yourself (DIY) cookbooks. Often focusing on vegan diet and cuisine, cookzines sprang from punk culture in the 1980s and continue to be published today. Cookzines contain recipes, info on veganism, personal testimonies, and commentary by the writer. Classic cookzines include Soy Not Oi! and Bark+Grass: Revolution Supper. Both Microcosm Publishing and AK Press carry a selection of old and new cookzines.

Food Jargon of the Day: Food Insecurity/Food Security

Food Insecurity
The inability to access enough nutritious foods to fulfill caloric needs.

Food Security
The availability of, and access to, a safe, nutritionally adequate, and culturally acceptable diet.

Food Jargon of the Day: Humane Meat, Mindful Meat-Eating, Post-vegetarian

Humane meat
Humanely-raised meat which comes from farms that try to give each of their animals a more pleasant life - i.e., animals are not caged, fed hormones or antibiotics, and are pasture-fed.

Mindful Meat-Eating
Ethical meat eating, i.e., eating only humanely-raised meat.
See also, Careful Carnivore/Caring Carnivore/Conscientious Carnivore.

Post-vegetarian
Individuals who were formerly vegetarian, but now eat meat.

Food Jargon of the Day: Mobile Slaughterhouse

Mobile Slaughterhouse (a.k.a. Slaughterhouse on Wheels)
A retrofitted diesel truck that serves as a slaughterhouse for farmers in remote areas of Washington and Oregon without easy access to U.S.D.A. approved butchering facilities. The mobile slaughterhouse is federally sanctioned and comes complete with a 300-gallon water tank, a cooling locker with carcass hooks, and a butcher.

Thanks to Gerard for the heads-up on this bit of jargon.

Food Jargon of the Day: Anti-Restaurant

Anti-restaurant
Another moniker for underground restaurants. Anti-restaurants are unlicensed restaurants in apartments and other private spaces run by individuals who do not necessarily aspire to full-time restaurateur-status or, in the words of a recent NY Times article, do not want to mess "with overhead and investors and the health department — a k a The Man — telling them what to do." Resistance, so it seems, can be tasty.

Food Jargon of The Day: Partisan Cookbooks

Partisan Cookbooks
From a recent LA Times article by Betty Hallock, partisan cookbooks are cookbooks created to gustatorily critique or promote the values of a political party. Examples of partisan cookbooks include the classic "Many Happy Returns: The Democrats' Cook Book, or How to Cook a G.O.P. Goose" published in 1960 as well as more recent entries such as "How to Eat Like a Republican" and (our favorite) "The Axis of Evil Cookbook."

Food Jargon of the Day: Mocktail

Mocktail
A nonalcoholic - or "mock" - cocktail.

Food Jargon of the Day: Passive Overeating

Passive Overeating
Eating whatever is put in front of you, even to the point of discomfort. In passive overeating, neither we nor our bodies recognize the extra calories and reduce the quantity of food accordingly.

Food Jargon of the Day: The Life Cycle of Food and Distavores

the life cycle of food
The total amount of energy that goes into the production of a food item over the course of its entire life cycle (from farm-to-fork). Food miles - how far food travels to get to your table - may not be the best standard when judging the environmental impact of food.

distavore
A farm-to-plane dinner created from items culled from faraway sites. Coined by Joel Stein in a snarky Time Magazine article entitled Extreme Eating, that aims to critique locavore eating habits.

Food Jargon of the Day: Lunch-line Cameras

Lunch-line Cameras
Surveillance cameras placed in school cafeterias to monitor student food-theft. School officials in Fairfax County Virginia are installing security cameras throughout the school system to combat what they claim is an estimated $1.2 million worth of prepared food lifted from secondary school cafeterias in the past year.

Food Jargon of the Day: Semivegetarian

Semivegetarian
A recent poll on vegetarian and vegan consumer trends found that 13% of adult Americans identified themselves as "semivegetarian" consuming meat with "fewer than half" of their meals. Also known as flexitarians.