MNN - Mother Nature Network

It’s Friday afternoon, and that means it’s time for me to give you a little weekend reading from around the web. Here are a few food related items that I thought might interest you.

Fed up with a New Jersey company's refusal to recall peanuts tied to the ongoing salmonella outbreak, the government issued a public alert and warned the company to comply immediately or face a government raid.

 

The Food and Drug Administration has warned the public not to consume "any peanuts or peanut-derived products" sold by Westco Fruit and Nuts Inc. of Irvington, N.J. Investigators have been wrestling with the company since February, but the FDA does not have the power to force a recall.

At a Christmas dinner last year in Los Angeles, Steve Fineberg basked in compliments for his chopped liver pate, then revealed a secret. He had prepared the hors d’oeuvre using lard, the widely reviled pig fat most commonly associated with clogged arteries and obesity jokes.

 

The crowd turned on him. The scrunched faces of some dinner guests, Mr. Fineberg says, screamed: “Stop. I don’t want to hear any more.” One guest declared that lard “will kill you.” Another, Joy Ferrara, recalls taking a reluctant bite, but says lard “is too much visually and mentally for me to handle. It’s just the whole stigma of it.”

When Michelle Obama broke ground on the new White House vegetable garden, there was probably no one in America more elated than Alice Waters. For months, Waters had been engaged in a very public lobbying effort to get the First Family to take this step in the name of healthy, sustainable eating. The mother of the local-food movement and owner of Berkeley's famed Chez Panisse restaurant talked to TIME about President Kennedy's influence on her ideals, why she has a newfound love for the Department of Agriculture and how a well-made pasta dish can soften the psychological blow of the recession.

 

This isn't the first time you've lobbied a President to plant a garden at the White House, right?

 

I've been writing letters since 1992.

Image: Matt Callow