Recently in food Category

OUT Bouillon cubes or powder, or canned stock.
IN Simmer a carrot, a celery stalk and half an onion in a couple of cups of water for 10 minutes and you're better off; if you have any chicken scraps, even a half-hour of cooking with those same vegetables will give you something 10 times better than any canned stock.

OUT Spices older than a year: smell before using; if you get a whiff of dust or must before you smell the spice, toss it. I find it easier to clean house once a year and buy new ones.
IN Fresh spices. Almost all spices are worth having. 

OUT Grated imitation "Parmesan" (beware the green cylinder, or any other pre-grated cheese for that matter).
IN Real Parmigiano-Reggiano. Wrapped well, it keeps for a year (scrape mold off if necessary). Grated over anything, there is no more magical ingredient.

As I was writing that earlier post on Apple's new MacBook, drooling over a product I want but absolutely do not need, I got a timely dose of reality. My Twitterific updated itself and showed me a long series of tweets from the folks at Blog Action Day, who were announcing progress on this today's annual blogfest for social justice. (Twitter--yet another tool for holy conviction.) 

[F]ood continues to be fetishized; organic food has been commodified; the federal government subsidizes almost all of the wrong kinds of food production; supermarkets peddle way too much nonreal food ("junk food" or, to use my mother's word, "dreck"); and weight-loss diets still discourage common-sense eating. 

But questions like "Would you prefer a mass-produced organic grape from Chile or a nonorganic one from a backyard vine in Upstate New York?" are more common in conversation, and the dialogue about food routinely includes words like locavore, vegetarian, sustainable and flexitarian. 

The real issues -- how do we grow and raise, distribute and sell, prepare and eat food? And how do our patterns of doing these things affect the rest of the world (and vice versa)? -- are simply too big to ignore. And if we are obsessing about where our food is from and how it's grown rather than whether our fries are cooked in beef fat or "cholesterol-free oil" (or, even worse, whether our gold-leaf-topped foie gras is good for us), this is progress.