Issue link: http://osercommunicationsgroup.uberflip.com/i/825189
Restaurant Daily News 4 3 Sunday, May 21, 2017 PERFECTING YOUR PASTA Pasta is the world's favorite food according to a global survey (BBC News, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13760559), so no wonder it's a staple menu item that customers can't seem to get enough of. The popularity of the Mediterranean diet has made pasta even more of a go-to ingredient and inspiration for mainstream cooking. Quality and consistency are key when it comes to cooking pasta to per- fection and pleasing pasta-loving cus- tomers. Even the freshest pasta made with the best ingredients needs to be cooked just right to achieve the ideal tex- ture. Pasta Cooking, Perfected As a leading manufacturer of high-per- formance products for commercial kitchens, Waring ® is proud to bring you the Pasta Cooker & Rethermalizer, which uses 240V and 3600W of power to reach a rolling boil in under 25 min- utes. For optimal convenience, it can be used as a stand-alone or plumbed in, with easy-access drain and refill valves in front. Engineered to meet customers' demand for fresh, perfectly cooked pasta, this unit features 12.4L (13.9 qt.) maxi- mum capacity and cooks up to 4 pounds of fresh or frozen pasta in minutes. Four round and two rectangular baskets make draining and plating large or small por- tions of pasta quick and easy. With its durable stainless steel construction and easy-to-clean tubular heating elements, this Pasta Cooker is built to stand up to years of high-volume use. Given its power to improve produc- tivity and ensure customer satisfaction, the Pasta Cooker & Rethermalizer is sure to give this year's atten- dees ample food for thought. "The NRA show is the perfect place to showcase our Pasta Cooker & Rethermalizer," said Waring Product Manager Samantha Mullins. "Commercial kitchens require a pasta cooking solution of this caliber, and we're excited to introduce it at such an influential gathering of restaurant and foodservice professionals." Feed Your Need for High Efficiency To save time and manpower, today's commercial kitchens need the most advanced equipment. The Waring Pasta Cooker cooks and re-thermalizes pasta on a large scale, without sacrificing qual- ity. By making pasta more efficiently, restaurant opera- tors can turn over orders faster and serve more customers. As an innovation that combines convenience and performance, the Pasta Cooker & Rethermalizer exemplifies Waring's long- standing commitment to pro- viding today's chefs with out- standing product break- throughs. For 80 years, Waring has been helping commercial kitchens meet the demands of their customers. Now, with the innovative Pasta Cooker & Rethermalizer, restaurants can boost the bottom line by cooking more pasta with greater efficiency. For more information, go to www. waringcommercialproducts.com or stop by booth #2616. GLOBAL WARMING REVERSAL TOOLS ALREADY AVAILABLE By Lorrie Baumann Practical solutions to reverse global warming already exist, and most of them are worthwhile to do even if they weren't tied together with climate change, according to Paul Hawken, Founder of Project Drawdown and editor of the recently published "Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming." Hawken reviewed some of these strate- gies and technologies for addressing cli- mate change during a March 8 address at Natural Products Expo West, held in Anaheim, California. Hawken started Project Drawdown in 2013 after it became obvious that global discussions about climate change were gloomy and becoming more alarm- ing all the time, and that their focus was on slowing down climate change rather than reversing it. He defines "draw- down" as that point in time when green- house gases peak and begin to decline on a year-to-year basis. "The rhetoric about climate change is about reduction, about slowing. If you're going down the wrong road, it's still the wrong road, even if you slow down," he said. "You don't want to solve climate change. It's like changing change. You want change. What we can do is reverse global warming. We don't want to fight climate change or do the war on carbon. This black/white duality is the cause of the problem." "If you Google the top solutions to climate change, what you get is proverbs," he added. "Proverbs are true, but they're not solutions. It's not help- ful." The goal of Project Drawdown was to identify the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming, and Hawken drew on the expertise of 120 scientists from 22 countries around the world who offered their ideas on strate- gies and technologies that are currently available and more than 80 other scien- tists who conducted peer reviews on those proposals, resulting in well-vetted data to back up a plan based on feasible and scalable projects that are already in place somewhere around the world. "It's not our plan. We did not make this plan. We found it. It's here," Hawken said. "This is humanity's collected wisdom. Are the odds terrible? Yeah. And we'll take the odds." There are costs associated with replicating these working projects in a global effort to solve the problem, but they're less than the cost of dealing with the consequences of global warming, according to Hawken. "That wasn't always true. We're going off old stories and old narratives about the economics," he added. "Is there a business case? What's the business case for double- glazing the planet? Destroying the world?" The per capita cost to achieve draw- down in 2050 is about $1.88 per person on the planet, according to Hawken. "The cost is de minimus. It's nothing at all," he said. "And it's getting cheaper." Food production as it's practiced today is a major contributor to global warming, and thus that industry has the greatest potential to change in ways that can help reverse global warming, most especially through educating girls, Hawken said. Educating girls is sixth on Hawken's list of the most effective means of reducing greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, and the provi- sion of family planning services that can help women to delay childbearing, if they choose to do so, is seventh. Together, they're the single most power- ful solution to global warming, accord- ing to Hawken. "When you leave girls in school, they make very different deci- sions and so do their daughters and their sons," he said. He noted that when girls get the opportunity receive an education, what happens next is that they stay in school and delay childbearing to accommodate their plans to use their education. Slowing the world's population growth will ease the economic stress that drives the need for greater industrial production that's fueling global warming, and pro- viding girls with the tools to practice bet- ter agriculture can increase the efficien- cy with which food is produced. Hawken noted that 80 percent of the food pro- duced in the world comes from small- holders, and the majority of them are women. "The majority of the food in the world comes from women," he said. "What they don't get is the training, the seeds and the tools that men get. If they did, food production would go up." First on that list of effective solu- tions is changing the way that we refrig- erate and air condition our environment to eliminate the use of chlorofluorocar- bon compounds, which are potent green- house gases. That's followed by increased use of wind turbines to gener- ate electricity, and then by reduction in food waste. It's estimated that about 30 percent of the food produced in the world is wasted, with much of that hap- pening as a result of spoilage during storage and transportation. Improved food storage techniques have already been identified as a priority for United Nations agencies. Adoption of plant-rich diets is another of the top solutions identified by Hawken's group. "We don't mean vegan or vegetarian. We just mean seriously reduced meat consumption in the west- ern world," he said. "It's making us sick. That would provide more protein for others in the world." Of the other solutions at the top of Hawken's list, several relate to agricul- ture and animal husbandry practices, while a few others relate to how we pro- duce energy, including greater use of rooftop solar power, development of geothermal energy sources and greater reliance on nuclear energy, including the possibility of hydrogen-boron fusion technology that's currently being tested. We need to use all of these potential solutions, not just a few of them, accord- ing to Hawken. "You can lead in a way that you never imagined because you have, not just the opportunity, but you have the know-how," he assured his audience of natural food producers. "You're right there in the catbird seat, and half of you are women." GROCERY INDUSTRY SEEKS TO REDUCE CONSUMER CONFUSION ON PRODUCT DATE LABELS In a new industry-wide effort to reduce consumer confusion about product date labels, grocery manufacturers and retail- ers have joined together to adopt standard wording on packaging about the quality and safety of products. The new initiative for common phrasing is led by the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Currently, more than 10 different date labels on packages – such as Sell By, Use By, Expires On, Best Before, Better if Used By or Best By – can result in con- fused consumers discarding a safe or usable product after the date on the pack- age. Reducing consumer confusion around product date labeling is projected to reduce total national food waste by 8 percent. The new voluntary initiative stream- lines the myriad date labels on consumer products packaging down to just two standard phrases. "BEST If Used By" describes product quality, where the product may not taste or perform as expected, but is safe to use or consume. "USE By" applies to the few products that are highly perishable and/or have a food safety concern over time; these products should be consumed by the date listed on the package and disposed of after that date. Retailers and manufacturers are encouraged to immediately begin phas- ing in the common wording with wide- spread adoption urged by the summer of 2018. Broad industry adoption of this new voluntary standard will occur over time, so companies have flexibility to make the changes in a way that ensures consistency across their product cate- gories.