Meat

The past year brought continued financial woes for small businesses across a wide array of industries — but not all of them. In a select few sectors, business is booming and sales expectations are soaring heading into 2013. Small agricultural companies and heavy-duty manufacturers are primed for some of the most rapid growth in the coming months, according to a new report from Sageworks based on financial data from thousands of firms with annual revenue below $10 million.

WARSAW, Poland — For some, it was a barbaric way to treat animals. For others, it was great business. Until January, slaughterhouses across Poland — a deeply Catholic nation — were the unlikely venues for the Islamic and Jewish slaughter of animals, which in both religions involves a swift cut to the throat of a conscious animal and death by bleeding. Millions of euros were being made exporting the halal and kosher meat to countries like Egypt, Iran and Israel, as well as to...

Washington, D.C.: I'm a vegetarian, deeply in love with my non-vegetarian boyfriend. He patiently accepts my vegetarian cooking, supplementing it with meat-filled lunches, but I would absolutely love to cook, as a surprise, a dish that's impressive but not super-hard for someone with no meat-cooking experience. What would you recommend? I'm a pretty good cook generally, and I grew up in a meat-cooking household, so I'm not completely clueless. Joe Yonan : Can you judge the depth of a vegetarian's love by how willing she is to cook meat?

ROME — The U.N. has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets. A 200-page report, released at a news conference at the U.N. agency's Rome headquarters, says 2 billion people worldwide already supplement their...

Putting together my favorite marinade takes some time, not least because I allow it to. I always start with red wine: one glass for me, one for the marinade. Then I set the two apart by adding garlic and chopped parsley to the wine I won't be drinking. When I pick some thyme from the veranda and rub the leaves between my hands, my kitchen fills with the smell of the Greek islands and never-ending summer. I throw the leaves in, along with grinds of black pepper, a crushed bay leaf and sometimes a drop or two of Tabasco, for temperament.

Regarding the Nov. 20 Food story "Is vegan turkey good enough to gobble?" : Staff writer Tim Carman's quip that "there's the issue of the fossil fuels required to produce these R&D darlings" was misleading, as making vegan mock meats requires far fewer fossil fuels than raising and killing animals, even the "organic, free-range" variety. Also, undercover investigations into hatcheries, factory farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses by groups such as Compassion Over Killing, Mercy for Animals and the Humane...

During the past few weeks, while the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers were fighting for their right to share Super Bowl XLIII turf with Bruce Springsteen on Sunday, we were training for a matchup we could both sink our teeth into: meat snack vs. meat snack. Our third annual recipe smackdown found us in familiar camps. The purist (Joe, formerly referred to as the Texan) opted for chicken wings, along with the hundreds of thousands of fans who reportedly will consume more than 1 billion of them this weekend.

More than 50,000 U.N. officials, scientists, environmental advocates and a few heads of state will gather this coming week in Rio de Janeiro for a conference on sustainable development. They're assembling 20 years after the first Earth Summit was held in the same city, and the goal now, as it was then, is to figure out how to cut dangerous greenhouse gases and help the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty. Or, to put it more starkly, how we can live ethically without threatening the ability of...

MONROVIA, Md. (AP) — A Maryland man faces criminal charges in Warren County, Va., for allegedly selling rotten meat from a supermarket garbage bin. Fifty-four-year-old Rodney Sparks of Monrovia is due back in court Sept. 18. He was arraigned Monday. Sparks runs a store called Rodney's Discount Foods in Front Royal, Va. A state food inspector alleges the store sold meat that was misbranded, uninspected and appeared unfit for human consumption. Investigators say they traced the meat...

Tom Sietsema "D o you have a boyfriend?" "What is your phone number?" "You take my breath away. " Medium Rare dares to be different in a number of ways, one of which is evident to customers visiting the restroom of the new meat market in Cleveland Park. Instead of the usual musical backdrop, patrons are serenaded by a flirty male voice uttering a series of come-ons translated into French. It's funny, the first time. If you haven't heard of the place by now,...

SALT LAKE CITY — Talk about a crab roll. About 75,000 pounds of frozen crab meat — more than 37 tons — spilled out of a truck leaving Salt Lake City. Utah Highway Patrol Cpl. Todd Johnson says the truck's driver miscalculated a turn and over-steered to the right. The tractor-trailer hit a metal guard rail and sign post, which ripped open its side. The trailer toppled over near dawn Friday, spilling most boxes of crab and some of the meat onto I-15 near Spanish Fork. The driver...

When the weather turns warm, I find myself craving the smell and taste of a great homemade burger off the grill. So what makes a great burger? There are a few simple rules. But if you remember just one of them, it should be that less really is more. Which is to say, the less you add to your ground beef, the less you handle the meat when mixing it, and the less you flip it while grilling, the better burger you get in the end. The foundation of my backyard burger is a 50-50 combination of...

The fresh dining room in Georgetown's latest hotel comes stocked with rich details. Bubbly, anyone? Take your pick from 10 labels chilling out in the champagne cart. Want a view with that? The C&O Canal is so close to the window, you could fish in it. Pools of space separate the linen-draped tables in the 70-seat Grill Room of the Capella Washington, an oasis of elan with lavender accents, broad leather chairs and parquet floors that a waiter says came from a castle in Germany.

A verbal altercation at an area hospital took a strange turn last week when an Arlington man pulled out a meat cleaver and used it in a threatening way, Arlington County police said Tuesday. Kareem Jorif, 34, was arguing with staff at the Virginia Hospital Center on North George Mason Drive, last Friday around 5:30 p.m., police said. He allegedly pulled a meat cleaver from his waistband and struck the door of a hospital room several times, police said. Jorif then allegedly threw the weapon...

The fat and cholesterol found in steak may not be the only components bad for the heart, according to researchers who have found another substance in red meat that can clog the arteries. The substance is called carnitine, and as bacteria in the gut breaks it down, it turns into a compound known to harden arteries, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Medicine. What's more, people who eat a lot of meat allow more of the bacteria that convert carnitine to the harmful compound to grow,...

To judge from the flap over the New York Times's obituary on Yvonne Brill , female scientists, no matter how brilliant, will always be forced to carry around their domestic baggage. Case in point: The Times initially deemed it newsworthy to lead its obit on Brill, the famed rocket scientist who helped keep our satellites in orbit, with this tidbit about her kitchen skills: "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise...

Though former president Bill Clinton isn't technically a vegan, his embrace last year of a "plant-based" diet with "no meat" and "no dairy" — and his accompanying 24-pound weight loss — made headlines for a small but growing movement. After all, only 3.2 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and just .5 percent fly the vegan flag, eschewing all animal products and byproducts in their kitchens and closets. But is veganism healthy? Emasculating? Difficult? Let's get the skinny on this unusual lifestyle.

I've been calling this my second "coming out," because it reminds me of the first time, when I was dealing with quite a different subject. For one thing, when I tell people about my recent switch to vegetarianism, I'm getting the same kinds of questions, especially from chefs and fellow food journalists, that I did so many decades ago when the news was about my sexual orientation. One chef sidled up to me while I was at the bar of her establishment recently and whispered, "Is it true what I heard?"

The sequester was supposed to be something new in Washington: a budget cut you couldn't beat. Once it hit, it hit. The money was gone, and nobody could get it back. That turned out to be true — for about three weeks. Then somebody beat it. Last week, President Obama signed a spending bill that gave the Agriculture Department's food inspectors what everybody else wanted: a get-out-of-the-sequester card. Their program got $55 million in new money, which replaced almost all of what the...

As the District takes steps to cull the deer herd in Rock Creek Park [" Four-night controlled deer hunt set for Rock Creek Park ," Metro, March 28], I hope officials will consider hiring a butcher or two to process the meat and donate it to local homeless shelters or food banks. I'm not a hunter, but after living in West Virginia for many years, I've had my share of venison. If the butchers don't want to take the time to carve up steaks and other cuts, the meat can always be ground and...