Bites : Trade War Boils Up

Economic reprisal time north of the border: The Italian government started subsidizing exported pasta April 1, and in response, the Canadian Wheat Board has restricted Italian pasta imports to Canada (the decision exempts gourmet stores and Italian restaurants). The pressure for the embargo came from the Canadian Pasta Mfrs. Assn., because Italian pasta currently undercuts the price of Canadian-made pasta by about 40%. Canada is a major producer of durum, the wheat preferred for pasta, and about half the durum it exports to Italy has been coming back to Canada as pasta.

It’s a Mood Thing

Half a dozen companies manufacture robot milking machines, where a cow can mosey up and get milked whenever she wants. Some machines give her a sweet snack before locating (and washing) the teats and hooking up a milking device. Round-the-clock milking allows cows to relieve their udders three times a day instead of two, so they’re more comfortable and produce 15% more milk. “It’s a little impersonal,” says Wim Nugtren, an executive at one of the robot companies, “but the cows tend to like it.”

A Way Fat Groove

The first Grateful Dead concert was 30 years ago, and within months the group’s fans were wearing buttons reading “Good Old Grateful Dead.” Someone outside the scene may find the unlimited devotion of “Deadheads” to their favorite rock band hard to understand. It’s a way of life, they explain.

Of course, that means it’s also a way of eating, as is shown by Ellen Zipern’s “Cooking With the Dead” (St. Martin’s: $7.99). The author, a Deadhead with a journalism degree, spent a year going to Dead concerts around the country and getting to know the people who sell snacks of, by and for Deadheads in the concert parking lots. Every recipe comes with a profile of the food seller, so the book is a sociological document as well as a cookbook.

Cookbook may not be quite the word; since Deadheads gravitate to far-edge health-food theories, there’s a lot of “fireless cuisine” here, such as the Wheel-of-creation-spiral-vegan-organic-no-electricity pizzas made from raw, sprouted wheat berries by a certain Harvest Earth Heart. The recipes--mostly funky vegetarian snacks, often with mystical or health claims--will appeal strongly to some people and utterly repel others (the latter are also unlikely to sympathize with the complaints about how hard it is to get truly organic ginseng).

If you’re looking this book over, bear in mind that Deadheads evidently use the word fat (or even fatty ) as a term of approval, not of nutritional content.

They Really Are the Chicken of the Sea

Unlike nearly all other fish, tuna are warmblooded. In fact, one of their main physiological problems is overheating.