This is not news – the New York Times and Slate have already been on it – but I’m still astounded at how easy it is to make your own yogurt.

Dairy products that go beyond milk tend to have an air of magic or sorcery about them. Yogurt, in particular, is a little eerie for being alive, and it’s certainly not anything I’d ever heard of my friends or family whipping up at home. Like butter, which I still naively tend to imagine being churned by a Swiss milkmaid in an idyllic meadow somewhere, I always kind of thought yogurt was something that only highly specialized masters could produce – yogurt elves, perhaps, or maybe an Indian yogi who spent all of his time on top of a mountain, meditating in front of a giant lake of milk until fermentation occurred. (more…)

As civil war ravages Sri Lanka and militants approach the capital of Pakistan, do you ever stop to wonder: in the throes of war, who’s making the chapatis?

If it seems as though I’m making light of serious situations, the film Cooking History asks you to consider the gravity of the question. The documentary by Slovak director Peter Kerekes, which picked up a special jury prize at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto last week, looks at major European conflicts of the 20th century from the perspective of some often-ignored but crucial figures in warfare: military chefs. (more…)

Poor pork farmers. The so-called “other white meat” has enough image problems to contend with on a good day; roughly 1.6 billion people already consider it an unclean and possibly blasphemous foodstuff. Now, with swine flu and attendant swine flu fever (the cultural kind, not the physical one – don’t panic) sweeping the globe, the pork industry is taking a serious hit as consumers avoid pig meat, fearing that their otherwise benign pork chops and ham hocks are harbouring the dreaded Influenza A (H1N1) virus, familiarly known – until now, anyhow – by its porcine handle.

Thing is, say farmers, it’s not possible to get the illness from eating pork, and there’s no evidence to show people are getting H1N1 from physical contact with pigs; therefore, it’s pretty unfair to be calling it “swine flu.” I can certainly see their point. We are afraid enough of food as it is, and giving us an excuse to panic over one particular foodstuff, especially a meat, is like telling a xenophobe that his new Somali neighbour is a witch doctor. (more…)

You may be familiar with the recent advertising campaign in which a man refuses a bite of his female friend’s salad on the grounds that he’s a “Meatatarian.” “Beef, bacon – you know, a Meatatarian? It’s a personal choice,” he says, thoughtfully jamming a Wendy’s burger with six strips of scar-pink bacon and two glistening brown patties into his mouth.

Putting aside just how ugly the word “Meatatarian” looks in print, the campaign gives us the latest interpretation of an interesting quirk in North American culture: the privileged status of meat. The central joke relies on the basic assumption that being a vegetarian is ridiculous and/or fey and/or heretical, and that any reasonable person knows meat is the best food you can eat.

This assumption – widely held by pit jockeys, CEOs and the few dozen cranky old men who had dinner at Fran’s Diner in Toronto before the Willie Nelson show earlier this month, one of whom I sat beside long enough to hear him give a long sermon to his mute wife about how vegetarians are all skinny, pale and sick-looking – is based in a few ideas about meat that ostensibly go all the way back to our caveman beginnings, but that, upon reflection, seem a bit out of touch with current realities. (more…)

It’s strange to think of food as “popular” — you may as well suggest the cool kids are really into breathing these days. Yet it’s inescapable: glance at the bestseller lists, turn on your TV or strike up a conversation over smoked salmon and arugula canapés at a cocktail party, and you’ll inevitably end up in some kind of dialogue with, or about, our collective obsession with food. And not just cooking and eating it, either, but where it comes from, where to buy it, how to eat it without destroying the world, who swears about it best, and what kind of potential there is for various hormone-injected forms of it to evolve into intelligent, malicious beings that will conspire to turn the tables on our consumer/consumable relationship and force us back into a Stone Age situation, in which we all live like nomads, running from cave to cave to escape notice and absorption by our genetically superior Grāpple® overlords. (more…)