The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Food and Drink

Mmmmm…

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It’s true. The lunch food here at Google was amazing. Baby green salad, maple glazed salmon, and delectable mixed vegetables. There were other options (portobello wellington, steak), but those were my selections. I could really eat my vegetables every day if they tasted like these.

Separately, Seth Godin blogs about the famous former Grateful Dead chef.

About the “show.” So far it’s pretty rudimentary but there are interesting tidbits here and there. Will either be writing about it for ClickZ or might post later here if it doesn’t gel into something that’s right for that audience.

Where California Cuisine Got its Start

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So now that we’re East Bay-ites, it’s only appropriate that we patronize our local eateries. That’s why when my husband’s birthday came around yesterday, we went to the venerable Chez Panisse. I’d been told by a co-worker that she’d been somewhat disappointed by the place. After all the hype, she said, it just wasn’t that special. After all, the culinary tradition pioneered by Alice Waters at the Berkeley eatery has now spread across the country (and the world?). Still, we wanted to check it out and experience it for ourselves.

The menu for Tuesday, May 3 (it’s unique every night downstairs and is a prix fixe menu):


  1. Green asparagus salad with almond vinaigrette and house-cured ham.
  2. Fried local fish and shellfish with herb mayonnaise.
  3. Grilled rack and loin of Cattail Creek lamb with new garlic sauce, morel mushroom cake, Chino Ranch greens, and baked new potatoes.
  4. Lucero Farm strawberry and Marsala feuillete.

Hype or no hype, we really enjoyed ourselves. Keeping in mind that this might be our last big blowout before the baby comes, we really savored every moment and every bite. Mmm…

Moo Moo Marketing

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Just got a customer retention e-mail from Niman Ranch that describes what its cattle eat in the winter. An excerpt:

When our cattle come to us from pasture, we feed them a ration of corn, wheat, barley, molasses, soybean and hay. The ration, which we have developed and refined over the years with the help of our veterinarians, doesn’t change depending on the season. But our cattle’s eating habits do.

Our cattle eat about 40 pounds of ration per day. When the winter comes and it gets colder, the cattle tend to eat more, to help them keep warmer. They almost have a sixth sense, letting them know a storm is coming, and may increase their consumption upto a range of 45 to 47 pounds of ration a day. When the storm arrives, interestingly, they back away from feed and may decrease to 38 pounds.

Their ration is 60 to 70 per cent dry matter. The liquid part of their feed consists of molasses whey and corn silage.

We’ve gotten so far removed from the processes that create the foods we eat that hearing about the eating habits of cattle is exotic and yet, somehow, comforting. I remember my rancher dad coming to visit me when I was living in Manhattan. His comment was something like, "So many people. Who is raising the food to feed them all?"

Of course, Niman Ranch’s e-mail message is especially comforting in this age of agribusiness and mad cow disease, when you’re often not really sure (and you probably don’t want to know) where your food is coming from. I just found it an interesting, amusing — and effective — sort of commentary on modern life. It might even drive me to buy more meat online.