In the early 70s, I abandoned my career as a printer/real-estate-broker/financial-planner/securities-dealer/and-I-forget-what-else to become a cook. During that decade, I went to France and Spain to learn cuisine; then I worked as a manager/cook/chef at various restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area until 1992, when I opened my own restaurant, Timo's.

I have always been good at learning things from books, so I never took any cooking lessons. Before getting my first cooking job, I did a lot of cooking at home. After I got into restaurant kitchens, before I went for a new job interview, I would get the menu for the restaurant I was applying at and got familiar with the items they served. I got lucky: about three years after I started cooking for a living I nailed the job of Chef de Cuisine at one of the best Bay area restaurants at the time. If you are curious, that story is here. While at that job, I relied heavily on the two books by Jacques Pépin shown below.

Being a true heathen, I never did buy that all-American classic, the Joy of Cooking.

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I have been trying to spread the word about GMOs on and off for several months. For a while, I paid for a Google AdWords campaign for grass-fed meats from US Wellness, based on these meats being guaranteed to not come from cloned animals. I decided to offer these meats for sale on the Timos site only after I ascertained these meats would never come from cloned animals - I even got a statement in writing from US Wellness guaranteeing this to be true. And, in fact, some people did buy meats from those ads.

My big objection to this whole GMO issue is the fact that it's very hard to know the origin of foods or whether they contain GMOs or not. The FDA and other government agencies allow this non-disclosure, in fact, even encourage false labeling (think of "raw" almonds in California). THAT HAS TO CHANGE. When you buy a piece of meat in a supermarket, you have no idea if that meat comes from a cloned animal or not. We cannot count on our government to protect us.

The thing I would like the most is to see disclosure from producers/sellers being compulsory.

I was surprised a few days ago when I was randomly browsing a series of restaurant menus and seeing, in more than one of them, meat items named "Niman Ranch [some-kind-of meat]".

Apparently, some chefs don't even get out of the kitchen to read the paper or otherwise learn the news. Bill Niman is no longer part of the company, which has now changed the feeding protocols to allow the use of antimicrobials and is moving the cattle to commercial feedlots for finishing – the Niman Ranch feedlot has been sold. Here is a recent article.

Too bad. Those menus now might as well read "Safeway flatiron" or "McDonalds rib eye".

Sad.

This item has been moved to my food/wine/good life site, http://www.webgourmand.com/wg/commentary/wgArticle.cfm?itemID=175, where it can be read in both English and Spanish.

This item has been moved to my food/wine/good life site, http://www.webgourmand.com/wg/commentary/wgArticle.cfm?itemID=180, where it can be read in both English and Spanish.

This item has been moved to my food/wine/good life site, http://www.webgourmand.com/wg/commentary/wgArticle.cfm?itemID=179, where it can be read in both English and Spanish.

This item has been moved to my food/wine/good life site, http://www.webgourmand.com/wg/commentary/wgArticle.cfm?itemID=170, so that it can be read in both English and Spanish.

I have been wanting to write about current restaurant experiences, but where I am at the present time, I just haven't been in one I want to take the time to write about. Perhaps, when I start getting out to San Diego, I will find something worth telling you about.

Restaurants are not all there is when it comes to food and cuisine – one could write volumes about the subject without ever using the R word. So, what I am going to do in the coming days is try to write about the subject in general.

I am going to start by posting two little essays that I wrote for my former restaurant's web site about some of my experiences. I hope some of you find these entertaining and worth a few minutes' time. See you soon.

I have lived in San Francisco since 1964, but have been in my native Colombia most of the past three years. I have been back in the U.S. since late 2006, but due to various circumstances, I am staying with one of my sons and his two daughters in So-Cal for an indefinite period, with plans to return to San Francisco sometime this summer.

We are in a not-so-little-anymore town called Lakeside, about 30 miles East of San Diego; on the way, you drive through an area that must have been settled by furniture salesmen or carpenters: the two fairly big communities you pass are creatively named El Cajón (The Drawer) and La Mesa (The Table). And North to your left, the biggest and most prominent thing is romantically called Escondido (Hidden).

A couple of months ago, my son invited me to drive out and stay overnight at the most popular week-end destination around here, to which the locals go in droves on Friday evenings, in traffic that makes the commute from Oakland to SF look like a cart ride from holes 3 to 4 at Pebble Beach. We would be cruising by an area where there are wineries and casinos in an Indian reservation. I had visions of driving through Napa-Sonoma and ending up near the South Tahoe shores. The Indian thing turned out to be a mall with lots of outlets; and I did see some terrain with what looked to me like weeds and brush, but I was wrong, those were vines!<more/>After 30 miles eastward, we arrived at what the locals here describe as their paradise: the desert – i.e. the Mojave. Now I have a vague idea of the working conditions our boys in Iraq have to endure, thanks to the Global Village Idiot (that was You-Know-Who's nickname in a newspaper I read in France about three years ago). But I digress ...

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