Good Eats: Effects of Hurricane Ike on the Oyster Industry

This week we saw lots of informative but grim food news: the oyster industry in Texas pulling itself back together, what delicious looking berries will actually kill you, a new film about the sad sorry state of our food supply, plus other reports from the world of Serious Eats below.

• Reviewed: 99-Cent Ikea Chocolate - Going cheap in light of the news that Hershey's is cheating you out of cocoa butter. They recommend Ikea's hazelnut bar.

• Effects of Hurricane Ike on the Oyster Industry - The infrastructure is "in shambles" but the oysters themselves are okay.

• Serious Cheese: Nothing Says Autumn Like Grilled Cheese and Apples - The Serious Eats cheese man pairs two old friends.

• Do Not Want: Poison Berries and Other Inedibles - What not to eat.

• New Food Documentary, Food Inc. - A new film on its way from the folks who did "An Inconvenient Truth": in other words, more on what not to eat.

Previous Good Eats: Apple Tart with Goat Cheese and Rose

Comments (2)

Re: the poisonous berry article.

I've been doing quite a bit of foraging and I've found that the things that really do look poisonous (which are few and far between) are poisonous. Those berries in the seriouseats article look scary and I see them sometimes.

But I encourage people to raid their landscaping and make chokeberry jam! The chokeberries are only poisonous if a large quantity of the raw seeds are consumed because they contain trace amounts of arsenic I believe. So do most stone fruit pits. But you would have to break open the pits and then eat the seed inside of the pit.

My parents had a yew tree when I was young. I used to pick off the berries and stick them on my fingers. It's a wonder that I never poisoned myself.