Meathead's Ruminations:
Thought for Food

Food is like sex, only you can talk about it in polite company. My ruminations, "Thought for Food" appear irregularly and covers a wide range of topics, from food, cooking, drink, and barbecue, and occasionally, politics. Don't get me started.

2013-4-4 New Meat Labeling Standards. Help Or Hindrance?

2011-6-6 What's Risker Than Raw Hamburger? Raw Sprouts!

2011-5-25 New USDA Recommended Temps Change Little and are Still Mindboggling. The USDA has just revised its recommended cooking temps for safety and pay no attention to flavor, texture, and juiciness.

2011-3-10 Google's New Recipe Search Creates a Pain. Here's how Google is trying to help make recipes easier to find, the unintended consequences, and how food bloggers can get in.

2010-2-10 Remembering Stuart Miller, the definition of bon vivant.

2009-10-16 Who Killed Gourmet Magazine? The beloved 68 year old grande dame of culinaria, died on October 5, 2009. And the obits say I killed her. Here's a thorough autopsy.

2009-04-30 The Air Force paid $328,829 for a portrait of Air Force One. Here's how they could have done it for $6.

Meathead goes Meatless. Call me Potatohead. Why on earth would a barbecue guy nicknamed Meathead decide to become Potatohead for a 30 days? Why would I violate my well publicized motto "No rules in the bedroom or dining room"? Because the way we grow meat has to change. Click here to read my detailed explanation and concerns and follow my attempts to live without meat for a month.

Words of wisdom for a blogger "The Internet is full of old growlers, of course, and if you opine on public issues, you'll get anonymous mail calling you a baby killer, torturer, tool of Satan, cat strangler and babbling idiot, which you accept as your due, like the static electricity you collect walking across a carpet. A slight shock, but it doesn't turn on any light bulbs." Garrison Keillor, 4/14/2010

2009-03-24 Thirty years after Three Mile Island, a lesson for today's economists. I remember March 28, 1979 and its lessons vividly. 30 years after the near melt down of a fail-safe nuclear power plant, there are lessons for economists and regulators at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

2009-03-01 Something is Beeping (from the Huffington Post). It is 3 a.m. and something with a battery somewhere in the house is crying out for a change like a child with dirty diapers.

2009-02-17 Best Hot Dog Gone (from the Huffington Post). The best hot dog in the town famous for hot dogs, perhaps the best hot dog in the nation, Best's Kosher Franks, has been chewed up and spit out by the conglomerate that swallowed it whole.

2009-02-15 Save Mr. Beef (from the Huffington Post). Another Chicago icon in danger.

2009-01-08 No Meat for a Month? No way! (from the Huffington Post) Chicago's health commissioner, Dr. Terry Mason, wants everyone to join him in going vegetarian for the month of January. First city officials tried to ban foie gras, then trans fats, and now another one wants us to lay off meat for 8.3% of the year? Not this Meathead.

2008-12-28 Lessons From Marley. There are two powerful teaching opportunities in the new movie "Marley & Me" and the film gets a PhD in one and flunks the other. Read this if you want to bring kids or if you have an incorrigible dog.

2008-11-30 An Open Letter to Charities (as published in the Chicago Tribune). I give money and time to charities. And I'm fairly generous with both. But when I give money it is on my terms. Click here to read my latest rant from the Chicago Tribune, "An open letter to charities."

2008-10-30 Italian Culinary Trends (as published in Restaurant Hospitality). I have just returned from two weeks in northern Italy. Since Italian culinary concepts have touched practically every cook in North America, I looked for what was new that might find its way into our repertoires. I was also interested in what is changing in the way Italians dine.

2008-08-19 How Will Chicago Top Beijing's Olympics (as published in the Chicago Tribune)? Easy! Here are some ideas for how we might show the world what Chicago culture is all about.

2008-07-22 Just Stay Home if You're That Persnickety (as published in the Chicago Tribune). So the City of Chicago has demanded that the actors in the hit musical Jersey Boys stop smoking on stage, no doubt to remind the world of the time we busted Lenny Bruce for using naughty words and when we fined chefs for serving foie gras.

2008-07-07 Stopping the Email Lies (as published in the Chicago Tribune). In the past year email hoaxes have forced me to tell two dear friends that I never want to hear from them again. Both seem compelled to send sham news to me and everyone else they know. Although they do not own mainstream broadcast networks, they are broadcasters, a fact they do not seem understand, and their emails contain a form of computer virus that, instead of destroying files, destroys the truth.

2008-06-07 Coalition of the Weeding (as published in the Washington Post). I have adopted the Bush Doctrine. I am planning pre-emptive attacks against an adversary so insidious that it menaces not only my own home but threatens to destabilize my entire neighborhood.

2008-05-16 Robert Mondavi, The Art Lover. The thing that always impressed me about Bob was that you could talk to him about anything, art, music, politics. So many winemakers know only winespeak. And, in fact, on the numerous occasions we met, we rarely talked wine.

2008-05-12 The Future for Foodies. Some things you might find at the National Restaurant Association Show. Or not.

2007-12-11 Food and the Flicks. Give your Netflix account a workout. Here's a compendium of movies with food in a leading role.

2007-07-20 Funny food at Moto. I have just had some of the most amazing smoked pork I have ever tasted. And it was not at Memphis in May or served on butcher paper south of the Mason Dixon Line. It was at a cutting edge restaurant with a Japanese name in Chicago.

2007-05-01 Meathead makes the College Football Hall of Fame. Meathead has been named the chief judge of the Kickoff Riboff and he reminisces about his brief career as a linebacker at the University of Florida.

2007-03-12 Fie on Foie Gras Bans. State Representative Robert Molaro (D-21st) has proposed a ban on foie gras in Illinois. Apparently he has not paid attention to the the fallout from a similar ban in Chicago or the facts that have been revealed in the debate surrounding it. He is either gullible or just publicity hungry, in which case, he should not force feed his silliness on the citizens of Illinois.

2007-03-09 Ernest Gallo: A Conundrum. Ernest Gallo died March 6 at age 97, but when I had dinner with him in 1978 he was at the height of his powers, running the largest wine selling machine in the world, and, after a long dinner, in one telling sentence, he demonstrated why he was such a conundrum, why he was both hallowed and hated.

...more to come (to be notified when new recipes and other articles come online, be sure to subscribe to my free, spam free, email newsletter).