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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Non-Tech

Trump’s Meals in a Box Plan for SNAP Participants is Full of Baloney

In an effort to cut spending on food assistance to low-income families, the Trump administration has proposed replacing some food stamps with a meal delivery type service. The Supplemental Nutrition Assitance Program (SNAP), often colloquially referred to as food stamps, provide a monthly supplement for purchasing healthy food to eligible, low-income families.

Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said these meal deliveries would be akin to Blue Apron, but the comparison is downright laughable when you look at what the government actually proposes.

Blue Apron customers get to choose their meals and receive insulated boxes of fresh proteins and vegetables. According to The Washington Post, recipients of “America’s Harvest Boxes” would get “shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables.” All these items would be homegrown by “American farmers and producers” for that added jingoistic je ne sais quoi.

For households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits (that’s 81% of SNAP households overall), half of those benefits would come in the form of these government-provided boxes.

Mulvaney defends the approach, saying that the government can buy food wholesale at a low cost, which is more economical than having people buy it directly at retail. Which technically may be true, but critics were quick to point out many of the problems with this Harvest Box approach.

Then there are the retailers. Walmart and Target could lose billions with these proposed cuts to food stamp purchases, and it would certainly hurt the new USDA pilot program set to launch later this year that allows food stamp purchases to be made with retailers online.

And that doesn’t even touch on the logistics and expense of having the government oversee preparation and shipping of millions of boxes on time on a regular basis.

To be sure, the food stamp program in America needs to be updated and improved. And there are startups such as All_ebt out there trying to make it easier for SNAP participants to access more options for fresher, healthier food through online food deliveries.

“We are going backwards in terms of technology,” said All_ebt founder Eli Calderón Morin told me by phone. “Fundamentally, I don’t think we should try to police what people eat.” Morin believes the conversation should be changed from punishing people simply because they are poor to empowering people to make better financial and healthier choices—which isn’t going to happen if the government takes those choices and boxes them up.

A 21st Century Thanksgiving Meal

Every year my grandfather spends about three days making the perfect turkey for Thanksgiving: He picks out a bird carefully, brines it in his own special salt mixture, seasons it, and lovingly places it in the oven. He even has special oven mitts that can only be used on Thanksgiving, by him (warning: do NOT try to touch them). Seven hours after he’s delivered it into the fire, it emerges, bone-dry and ready to scratch our throats with its parched flesh.

There has to be a better way! And fortunately, this year, there is. Here are seven new-school ways to make old-school Thanksgiving favorites, with the most cutting-edge devices on (and off) the market.

Turkey

First get yourself a connected oven, which you can preheat from your phone and which boasts sensors that calibrate oven thermodynamics and help cook your bird evenly. Just in case, test the meat with a nifty connected thermometer, which is much fancier than you really need but is actually pretty fun to use.

Or if you’ve gone the tofurkey route in the past, treat yourself with some SuperMeat, created by culturing a biopsy of an animal so that everyone can stay happy and alive.

Sweet Potatoes

Make sweet potatoes easy by putting whole potatoes in a pressure cooker and letting them go. They’ll come out soft and supple, ready to be combined with some browned butter and whipped into oblivion.

Stuffing

Why stuff breadcrumbs inside a bird when you can stuff them in a plastic bag and tepid water? Grant Achatz from Alinea prefers to sous vide his stuffing, and we’re totally on board.

Pumpkin Pie

Leave the whipped cream in the past and top your pie with sage foam, made by putting fried sage leaves and water in a sous vide, then whipping the mixture into stiff peaks.

Cranberry Sauce

Cranberries should not be can-shaped. Modernist Cuisine’s recipe turns the traditional one on its head by putting fresh berries and juice in a sous vide and then carbonating them in a siphon charged with carbon dioxide. Tangy and bubbly!

Gravy

No one likes lumps in their gravy. Use Dave Arnold’s new centrifuge to maximize flavor and create a smooth, silky texture.

Green Bean Casserole

First grow your own green beans and onions with a SproutsIO system, which helps you become a green thumb by giving you a nifty device that fits in your home, guiding you through the process, and monitoring your success. Next, dehydrate those onions with a DIY connected food dehydrator. Combine with centrifuged cream of mushroom soup and bake in your connected oven for about half an hour. Easy!

Butter

Start with great butter. Then make the butter-passing robot from Rick and Morty. Last, spend the entire Thanksgiving meal moving the butter away from your obnoxious brother-in-law.

Are These Crowdfunding Projects the Next George Foreman Grill?

We talk a lot about the high-tech kitchen here at the Spoon, but we’re also fascinated by low-tech kitchen sensations, and no low-tech kitchen gadget has been more successful than the George Foreman Grill.

A few weeks ago we interviewed the inventor of the George Foreman Grill, Michael Boehm, who told us the story behind the infomercial sensation. But that was back in the ’90s. These days blossoming startups don’t take to TV but rather connect on crowdfunding sites to make their fortune.

Here are seven low-tech projects that might just be the next George Foreman Grill:

Empanada Maker

Simplify the process of making empanadas by using this tortillas-press-like device that would make Boehm proud. No muss, no fuss, no electricity. It’s even got a snappy name: the margariteña. The company wants to make the device lighter, which is why they’re raising funds.

Portable Keg

Unless you’re in college, it’s absolutely unacceptable to keep your keg cold by floating it in a trash can full of ice. DraftPak has a cooler solution: Put the DraftPak (which looks suspiciously like a cooler/trash can) on top of the keg and add ice! On the positive side, it uses CO2, so you don’t need to pump the keg.

Hipster Ice Cubes

You know how when you go to a fancy cocktail bar these days, it takes the mixologist about 30 minutes to make your drink? Well, part of that is the bespoke ice cubes. Skip the line and make your own ice and cocktails at home with the Ice Ball Press, which makes a 2.5-inch sphere. (Note: It would also make a killer snow ball to throw at that neighbor you hate.)

Edible Non-Drip Ice Cream Cones

No more melted ice cream dripping down your arm! More importantly, no more melted ice cream dripping down your kids’ arms! Halo Cone stops that in its tracks, with a weird plastic device that catches the liquid. We’re not exactly sure how it’s edible, but we believe in the future.

Water Purifier

This one is essentially a plastic bag that harnesses UV light to kill bacteria in water, making it safe to drink. The company is aiming to help during and after natural disasters like the hurricane in Haiti, and they’re raising funds to scale production of the bags.

Manual Espresso Makers

There are actually two crowdfunding projects right now that do the same thing: help you make espresso the “old-fashioned” way. With both the PREXO and the Flair makers, you tamp the coffee grounds yourself; in the PREXO a piston extracts the espresso, and in the Flair you push down on a lever with your hand. It seems like a fair amount of work, but both are small devices that can easily be stored, not like the massive La Marzocco machine.

So what’s the takeaway here? There’s much innovation in the kitchen that doesn’t necessarily have to do with technology. In particular with the espresso makers, it’s clear that people are interested in returning to making food “by hand.” Does that mean it will taste better? Not necessarily. It’s about both accessibility and the desire to be involved in the food-making process. Even if that means ridiculous sphere-shaped ice for your craft cocktail.

Tales From The Soda Wars (Home Edition)

The first in an occasional series of (only) slightly less serious looks at the challenges of kitchen and home tech from humorist and blogger, Janet Payton.

Growing up in late 70s and early 80s, I regularly enjoyed healthy, home-cooked meals prepared by my mother. But my parents were children during WWII, and wartime sugar rationing clearly had an impact on their eating habits. They stockpiled the sweet stuff like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. As a result, I regularly feasted on sugary sodas, candy bars, ice cream, and all things Hostess.

As an adult, I have managed to cut down on junk food and soda consumption, but I still toss back a couple of Diet Cokes every week. Yes, I know soda, particularly diet soda, is terrible for me (thanks a lot, well-meaning Facebook friends). But I’m a lazy person, and soda is tasty and convenient. I also don’t take vitamins or floss regularly. Feel free to call my health care professionals.

I wanted to stop drinking diet soda permanently, but I still craved something cold and fizzy. I tried mineral water flavored with lemon. Meh. Later I resorted to kombucha, which is very expensive and tastes like the spoiled root beer I made in my 6th-grade science class. Kombucha is supposed to aid in digestion, but if you’re someone like me who is blessed with excellent digestion (probably because I don’t take vitamins), it just makes you sick to your stomach. Plus I think you’re required to do yoga while you drink it. Blech.

Enter the home soda maker.  

The home soda maker has always seemed kind of unnecessary to me. The idea behind any good kitchen technology is that it’s supposed to make life easier for working parents. You know, so we have more time to pretend to help our kids with homework or search for something we haven’t seen yet on Netflix. But is there anything easier or cheaper than grabbing a delicious carbonated beverage? They’re everywhere. That said, the Gen-Xer in me liked the idea that I could make healthier, fancier sodas, while also cutting down on waste. Healthy and good for the environment? Sign me up. I was jazzed to use this new technology to make me feel even more self-righteous.

So off I went to my local one stop shopping center to pick up some kale-based dinner options and the SodaStream PLAY. I wanted to add my own natural flavorings to my sodas, but I can’t resist a good impulse buy, so I threw some SodaStream Diet Dr. Pete syrup in my cart purely for the comic potential. I know. I know. Those syrups are no better for me than convenient store-bought beverages. But it’s Diet Dr. Pete for cryin’ out loud! I had to try it at least once.

Back home, I walked into my kitchen with my groceries and new gadget to find my work-at-home husband standing in his underwear making his third cup of coffee. He laughed at my purchase (and, I might add, Diet Dr. Pete killed!), but in the time I turned my back to put away the bread, he had busted open the box like a child on Christmas morning and had started to force-fit pieces of my new purchase together. 

I am a rule follower, so after whipping out the instruction manual and frantically scanning two full pages of warnings about personal injury, property damage and CO2 death scares. I was convinced this was going to turn into an episode of Jackass. I considered Facebook-livestreaming our adventure, but one of us wasn’t dressed for it.

Me: Could a CO2 leak from this bottle kill us?

My husband: Not sure. I guess we’ll find out!

By the time I had finished reading the warnings out loud, my husband had nearly assembled the whole device. I was ready to give it a go, but by this point, the promise of certain death had me so on edge that as soon as I inserted the carbonating bottleneck in the Snap-Lock position and it made the slightest of sounds, I jumped about a foot.

Me (handing bottle to my husband): Here, you do it. But put some pants on first.

Most things don’t scare me. I am the one who kills all the spiders in the house. I enjoy public speaking. I find ventriloquist dummies charming. I just don’t like gas or the potential for explosions of any kind. This is why you will never see me lighting the grill. That story about ESPN’S Hannah Storm losing her eyebrows and eyelashes after her gas grill exploded in her face might as well have been written by Stephen King. It haunts me to this day.

My inner voice of reason ultimately prevailed. Really, what are the odds a company would make a soda machine that’s appealing to children and also highly explosive? Besides, my husband looked like he was having too much fun with my new purchase. I made him step aside, and I took charge of the situation.

I snapped the bottle into place, pushed down on the carbonating block a few times, added some very-bad-for-me syrup flavoring to the fizzy water, and within seconds  I had a refreshing Diet Dr. Pete. Granted, buying a Diet Coke at the store is way easier and probably cheaper, but the level of smugness I felt was totally worth it. I made my own soda. It was like I was homebrewing beer, only without the mess of fermentation, beards, and utilikilts. And it was good too! If only my 6th-grade science teacher could see me now.

Bottom line: I like this home soda maker. It’s lightweight, doesn’t require a plug-in or batteries, and takes up minimal counter space. And it’s fun! You can control the amount of bubbles and flavoring depending on the person or mood. For instance, if I’ve had a particularly hard day, I can totally go wild with a few more hits of the carbonating block, and then throw in a couple of extra shots of Dr. Pete.

I look forward to trying new natural flavors, which is the main reason for buying the SodaStream PLAY in the first place. There’s a rhubarb soda I’m dying to make with my neighbor’s homegrown rhubarb. I’m sure I’ll eventually add some sugar to a few of these concoctions. In honor of my parents, of course. I wouldn’t want their sugar rationing to have been in vain.

Image credit: K.G.23 on Flickr