The Business End

Hosted by: Nelson Harvey and Annie Myers

Produced by: Lorenzo Ragionieri

Engineered by: Nat Weiner

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Annie Myers and Nelson Harvey take listeners out of the dining room, through the kitchen, and out to the loading dock of New York's food system, the place where the real action is. Myers and Harvey endeavor to explain how the city's food system–the intricate and complex web that somehow manages to feed 8 million people every day–actually works. They focus on the untold stories of the people who make the system go: the truck drivers, distributors, farmers and fishermen who are working behind the scenes and around the clock.

Myers and Harvey have worn many hats in New York City's food world, working for restaurants, recycling shops, cheese dealers, public markets, university environmental committees, websites and blogs alike. Myers is currently a forager for The Spotted Pig restaurant, and Harvey is the self-titled 'VP of Mongering' for Eckerton Hill Farms in the Union Square Farmer's Market.

Episodes:

The Business End

First Aired - 12/03/2009 01:00PM

This week's installment of The Business End is all about bread, with Sullivan Street Bakery owner Jim Lahey and City Harvest's Jennifer McLean.

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Bread: A Primer (5:30)

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Tags:

bread our most basic food, bread can be a labor-intensive and time-consuming food, when villages used communal ovens they would place a mark on their loaves to differentiate them from those of other families, this tradition is now visible in the slashes found in loaves, ethnic baking traditions practiced in five boroughs, a lot of wasted bread everywhere especially in New York City, if bread is not made with additives and preservatives it is only good fresh and then is wasted for the most part,

Jim Lahey Introduces The Sullivan Street Bakery (14:12)

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Tags:

Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery, how much bread does Sullivan Street Bakery actually make?, Jim employs twenty bakers, craft baking, wholesale and retail baking operations, most of the baking is done between 5PM and 5AM, what are the most difficult aspects of running a bakery like Jim's?, waste disposal should be taken out of the hands of private carting companies, we're still exporting too much of our waste to third world countries, how does Sullivan Street Bakery stack up against other big bakeries?, food handling and food processing jobs tend to be looked down upon, new and resurgent interest in craft and handmade foods, skyrocketing costs of gas and flour, prices of bread going down,

City Harvest: Using Surplus to Feed the Hungry (11:29)

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Tags:

food rescue, what happens to all the food in New York City that doesn't get eaten?, CIty Harvest re-distributes unused foods to various organizations, City Harvest is the bridge that connects the food industry with the city's hungry, 17 refrigerated trucks on the road, 325 million pounds of food re-distributed by City Harvest, who are the biggest donors?, Sulliva Street Bakery is the biggest donor to CIty Harvest, City Harvest may pick up 70 bags of bread from Sullivan Street Bakery but that is only a small fraction of what the bakery's daily business consisted of, bread inherently doesn't need to be refrigerated, bread is shelf stable for a few days,

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The Business End

First Aired - 11/19/2009 01:00PM

On this week's episode of The Business End, Annie and Nelson share the mic with Imran Uddin, proprietor of Madani Halal, who discusses the rituals associated with the traditional preparation of halal food.

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