The World's Great Coffee Cities

8 of the world's great coffee cities http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/04/travel/best-coffee-cities/

Foreign Beef In Paris

NYTimes: Your Imported Beef Is Served http://nyti.ms/1fCPybL

Cafe Cesura

Tried Cesura in Bellevue again since we have been having such bad luck with coffee lately. Either the coffee is too lightly or darkly roasted, or the coffee is made so poorly that it tastes bitter or burnt.
Today when we went in my husband bought his uncustomary latte to go since we don't like our coffee in a tumbler and it was a good cup of coffee. However, my hazelnut cappuccino was not so great. The coffee had started out well enough;  the milk was nice and frothy, the shots had been pulled in good time and the latte art was pretty good. Normally, one would be able to say that it was bitter or the milk was scalded and tasted sour but not this time.
This time the only thing that I can say is that the taste just wasn't there. I mean the hazelnut was over done and the coffee was bitter, tepid and had a lack luster quality that leaves you only being able to state that it just fell flat.
Guess I am going to need a good recommendation for a local independent coffee shop. Anybody have any suggestions for me?

What About The Farmers Who Can't Afford The Organic Label?

Organic vs. Natural. I was on the Environmental Working Group (EWG) website as I'm a huge supporter of our farmers and ranchers and I realized that I see only support for the organic farmers. But what about those farmers and ranchers that can't afford to have the USDA stamp even though they are exactly the same? Don't they deserve our support and assistance in keeping our food sources going and nontoxic to our kids?

As a previous working Buckaroo (Yes, that is what it is called when you work as a ranch hand in the style of the old Vaqueros of Spain.), I have worked on some of the largest and all natural beef ranches on in the continental US and while they might have the capital to ensure that their beef has he USDA stamp of organic approval their neighbors, the mom and pop farmers, don't. 

Back in the '70s there was a kind of experiment that the farmers and ranchers were trying out. Hormones to promote calf growth after conception was a brief and was soon nixed by the majority of the ranchers due to the mother cows' over stress during calving. It wasn't long after that agriculture went into a recession so traumatic that when the global recession hit they didn't even feel it. With this being the case, coming up with the capital to have hay, fields, equipment and butchers inspected by the USDA inspectors and put into use is severely costly for this vastly shrinking population. 

The question now is, even with the overall agreement to ban the hormones and the antibiotics, aside from penicillin, within the beef ranching community wouldn't you still buy your meat from these farms? Wouldn't you want to not only support your local rancher but also gain all of the nutritional benefit of a USDA certified organic product without the higher cost? Just in beef alone buying meat from a small naturally produced beef ranch would be considerably less costly since it is the rancher that absorbs the USDA seal of approval until it reaches us the consumer.

Now I'm sure that there are several other types of farming where this same situation would apply but as my background is only in beef ranching I can only speak from my point of view. But even if there are other types of farms like these ranches, wouldn't you still or even prefer to buy from someone from a small American ranch the same exact product only it was cheaper because it didn't have a seal? Wouldn't that just make more sense?

Antibiotics On The Farm

To treat or not to treat? I just read the blog from NPRFood, Are Antibiotics On The Farm Risky Business? and I know I'm controversial on the subject. (On a side note: my husband and I don't argue politics, we argue food topics, such as this.) 

Like the majority of the population, I'm sure, I don't want to see any living thing suffer from any sort of an illness, however, I also don't want to have the side effects of the animal antibiotics. As someone who has worked on cattle ranches for several years, I'm familiar with quite a few ranches on the west coast. I'm not saying all, but at least the ones I've been to or have worked on do not use hormones or antibiotics outside of penicillin.

For the USDA to consider a beef organic there has to be certified fields, hay, and no hormones or antibiotics, among other things. Now, there isn't a whole lot of difference between one field and another, grass is grass, especially if people leave it alone, but do you think penicillin should be on that antibiotic list? You can find penicillin on your bread if it's a week or so old. Plus, on the ranches I'm familiar with a low dose of penicillin treats debilitating illnesses like pink eye, which if left untreated will cause cataracts and eventually blindness. So the question still remains...to treat or not to treat? 

If treated, penicillin will run through a bovine in the matter of a couple of weeks and it takes longer than that for that specific animal to be transported to the butcher for slaughter, typically. Once that bovine has been treated though it can no longer be classified as organic, ever. It can still be termed natural but because the animal needed this "antibiotic" it is now a lower in price food source due to a consumer deterrent.

All of the farmers and ranchers that I have spoken to in recent years don't want to use anything that would increase growth either as then it would put the mama cow in jeopardy during her birthing and she is worth a lot more than a few more bucks at the time of slaughter.

So now that I have rambled on with all of this information, what do you think? Would you still eat a steak if the animal had been treated with penicillin at some point in its life? Or would you pay more for the USDA certified organic even though both animals had the same quality of feed, the same living conditions in the same area, but one was just treated so it would no longer be in pain? Could I go so far to even ask, after knowing all of this, is organic beef still even worth it?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/07/11/200870193/are-antibiotics-on-the-farm-risky-business?ft=1&f=1053&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

A Dollar Value Meal

Fast food. There really is no such thing when you find out what they put in your so called meal deal. I just watched a segment on the news about how there are several fast food chains that are now competing with each other for the around a Dollar Value Meals. What a joke. Time Magazine even stated that cooking at home is cheaper and faster than buying fast food at places like McDonald's. Most people didn't even know that McDonald's put a pink slim in their meat to preserve it.

In Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore Dilemma, he states that there are 38 ingredients in the Chicken McNugget! Now I don't know about you, but there weren't 38 ingredients in the fresh, seasonal and organic meal my husband/chef just made me and our toddler for dinner. Knowing this, ask yourself: Would you want your child eating a Chicken McNugget or something that comes from a similar establishment? We won't even touch on the cleanliness of the kitchens these chemically altered so called meals were derived from. (That's for another day.) But knowing these things are enough to make a person, a parent, never want to eat out again.

And don't get me wrong. I completely understand the argument of convenience. However, did you know that you could make something else like a fruit/yogurt smoothie to take with you for your kids so not only are they actually eating something healthy but easy, convenient and less expensive? It's so much easier to buy a travel cup of their choice and put in it for the road something like mango, peaches, pears, strawberries, raspberries, kiwi, banana and yogurt blended together. As we come into summer the options for fruit and vegetables are so much more variable that the choice between a McNugget and a fruit/yogurt smoothie seems obvious to me. Does it to you?

Newspaper Food Section

I was just searching the web for any thing on food that I could find and came across several city newspapers in various states. They all have a food, wine or dining section especially if they are considered a food town, like Portland, Oregon or  San Francisco,  California. Now why is it the Seattle Times doesn't have this section if we are such a big foodie town? Are we really or do we just think we are but don't realize the key ingredients that are missing from our social scenes to make Seattlites true foodies? If the latter is the case, what can we do to get Seattle there?