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Last week Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz were dismissive toward the idea of sustainability in a New York Times piece. We found this a little hard to fully credit (The French Laundry Cookbook is full of pieces about Keller buying from local purveyors; does he really give no thought to shipping and other environmental costs in choosing to cook what's around him?) And we apparently weren't the only ones; Anthony Todd talked to several local food figures of various sorts to get their reactions, which ranged from cynical ("By implying that farm-to-table chefs are guilt-ridden buzzkills who think too much, on the one hand, they're selling hedonism; on the other hand, they're ensuring their relevancy by distinguishing themselves from other chefs," says Wendy Aeschlimann of The Local Beet) to c'est la vie ("I tend to not stand on a soap box and say that everyone should do it this way because I believe it to be the right choice. I do what I can," says Cleetus Friedman of City Provisions). [Chicagoist]

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, it’s that there is certainly nothing pretty about meat processing. Images of crowded feed lots, filthy kill floors, and diseased livestock take much of the pleasure out of eating meat for many of us. But if you think you’re safe eating your faux meats, you’d better think again! In North Carolina, more than 80 people have been sickened with salmonella and they didn’t get it from eating cheeseburgers or pork chops. The culprit is the meatless wonder tempeh.

Outsiders may judge a chef highly, but Blackbird makes decisions based on its own sense of what's right for one of Chicago's longest-running and most successful top-flight restaurants. And so for the second time, as 312DiningDiva reported, a chef leaves Blackbird just months after he was honored by Food & Wine magazine as one of the best in the country. Pastry chef Bryce Caron was recruited to Blackbird from Custom House in 2011 to succeed Patrick Fahy (who went to the Sofitel), and to many observers Caron's desserts were in a similar vein, with abstract forms and a blend of sweet and savory. (He also prepared the desserts for Blackbird's sibling Avec.) As David Tamarkin observed at the time, "Caron's style is much more aligned with pastry chefs such as Fahy and Fahy's predecessor, Tim Dahl [than with the food at Custom House], and his style will certainly feel more streamlined at the end of a meal by David Posey, Blackbird's chef de cuisine."

It's like a Monty Python parody of radicalism— something calling itself "South Side Chicago Anti-Racist Action" struck a blow against the system by... invading an Irish restaurant with the quaint name of The Ashford House in Tinley Park. It was no joke, though, when a gang of 15 to 20 hooded young people carrying clubs and hammers attacked a group of alleged white supremacists and/or neo-Nazis at the south suburban restaurant Saturday night— and beat indiscriminately on anyone within range, sending a number of people to the hospital and causing an estimated $15,000-20,000 in damage. The end result was an attack so moronically vicious that it succeeded in making the Nazis the sympathetic side, and seems likely to win the title of worst protest of the entire NATO week. Way to fight the power (which as we all know is located on 159th street in Tinley Park), geniuses.