Dregs Round-up for December 2014

Here are a collection of links and interesting rumours that haven't made it to a full post.

Toronto and Montreal got a shout out from Daniel Boulud as cities to watch for interesting food.

While I am starting to think about a series on the issues that foodies face while grocery shopping, along comes an article that talks about replacing meat with vegetable protein. While it handles many issues of higher inefficiencies that in converting plants to muscle, it doesn't say enough about the issues of eating less processed food. I think the article in some ways furthers the more mechanistic and nutrionist leanings of food culture. The idea that animals are nothing more than conversion machines. Anyways, it was a good read and I am definitely interested in protein from other sources and of course, have issues with fake meat.

Just yesterday I talked about beer flavoured coffee and updating my quest. Seems Starbucks has beaten me to the beer barrel. The good news is that the tasters aren't exactly loving it. My experiments are here: 1st Attempt, 2nd Attempt.

Speaking about coffee and beer, Boxcar Social which I reviewed here will be opening up another location on Queen East in the land of decent coffee. There place will have a good beer focus as well. Not sure of the opening date but they have inked the contract.

Boxcar let slip that they believe a brewery will be opening up beside their new location. There is already a bunch of breweries looking or set up on the East Side. Left Field, Sweetgrass and Louis Cifer are the ones that are well known and given coverage. On Mom and Hops, there are a number of planned breweries for Toronto and some seem to have an eastern connection.

- Danforth Brewing
- Strathmore Brewing
- Muddy York Brewing, and
- The Only Nanobrewery.

None of these seem like the likely candidate and so I wait to hear more. Anyways, there are a few morsels that I couldn't quite make into a full blog post unless I did some serious work.

Resolutions 2015

Today I was going to write about either microwave cooking or some type of foodie resolutions of eating better, or smarter or whatever. Instead, after a discussion with a close friend, I'm going to be more ambitious with this post. No resolving to change behaviours or achieving measurable goals this year; I want to focus on shifting priorities. I want to describe the journeys that I want to go on this year and where I hope to end up.

Explorations:
Jordan St. John has posted a good post on what is happening in beer policy land and I am still skeptical on how to achieve the goals of replacing a whole sail system with bits and bobs of fabric and expecting it to stay afloat. If something can and does shift this system, it would be interesting if some of the same approaches could be used in the food system. If this doesn't make sense to you, it is because I haven't unpacked any of it and that is what I hope I can post about. Examples include:
- Farmers' market and whether they are just feel good for urbanites
- Maybe our grocery stores are a type of ogliopoly
- CSAs and how they are supposed to work
- Big business got that way for a reason such as reducing inefficiencies in the system so what is the purpose of these smaller markets or to put another way, goals such as sustainability bring what value?
- Are small and craft sustainable? If not, should we look at ways of helping make it so?

Experiments:
A bunch of my experiments disappeared and I need to bring them back and update them.
- beer flavoured coffee
- teff beer
- post about more of the "failures"

Evolution (just so I can use another E word):
- changes in my approaches to food now that I am a single dad or just single sometimes
- expand on my drunk reviews, maybe even split em off. Not related at all to the first bullet.
- more reviews on vegetarian and vegan places or even damn good dishes

End targets:
- publish more posts in more areas and more sites
- you mean I can get paid for this?

So those are my best guesses at things that I'd like to do with this blog this year. Of course, there will always be posts on whatever strikes my fancy but I think it is time that I started focusing on a few things...