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Espiritu in Mesa is one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants 2022
Eater released its roundup of 15 best new restaurants of 2022 on Dec. 6 and a Mexican restaurant and cocktail bar in Mesa made the list.
Espiritu Cocktails + Comida, from the renowned teams behind Bacanora and Tacos Chiwas, opened in downtown Mesa in January. The menu is broken up into six “chapters” which include “Shooketh” and “Stirredeth” cocktails, margaritas, shots and a “Choose your own adventure” personalized cocktail option. Espiritu also serves brunch and dinner.
Eater’s Lauren Saria (formerly The Arizona Republic’s dining editor) praised chef Roberto Centeno’s live-fire skills. Centeno also received recognition on Food Network this year as a grand-prize winner of “Chopped.”
The restaurant list is compiled with the help of Eater’s team of national and city writers and editors.
Blue crab, brunch and plenty of pizza:35 restaurants opened in metro Phoenix in November
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Higher food prices worsen hunger crisis this holiday season
WASHINGTON (AP) — Staffers at Bread for the City, a venerable charity in the nation’s capital, thought they were prepared for this year’s annual pre-Thanksgiving Holiday Helpers food giveaway. The pandemic had faded, but inflation was high, so they budgeted to give out 12,000 meals, 20% higher than normal pre-pandemic levels.
But they were quickly overwhelmed, with long lines of clients waiting hours to receive a free turkey and a $50 debit card for groceries. They were forced to shut down three days early after helping 16,000 people, much more than anticipated.
“We don’t want to retraumatize our community by having them wait outside four hours for a turkey,” said Ashley Domm, the charity’s chief development officer. “We are not set up to have hundreds of people lined up on a city street.”
Bread for the City’s experience reflects a larger dynamic playing out across the country. What many Americans hoped would be the first normal holiday season in three years has instead been thrown into a heightened hunger crisis once again, with Christmas on the horizon.
A September report by the Urban Institute estimated that about 1 in 5 adults experienced household food insecurity last summer, about the same as during the first year of the pandemic but a sharp increase from the spring of 2021. Black and Hispanic adults reported higher rates of food insecurity than their white counterparts, according to the report.
“In the pandemic, nobody had jobs and nobody had money,” said Nancy Murphy, a 45-year old caregiver picking up a frozen turkey and groceries last week from a giveaway at the Redeemed Christian Church of God New Wine Assembly church in northeast Washington . “Now they’re back at their jobs but the money isn’t going far enough. It’s still hard.”
The government estimates food prices will be up 9.5% to 10.5% this year. And that’s squeezing the budgets of many Americans and the food banks that have helped them, especially with the expiration of the massive flow of pandemic relief aid.
“ Inflation has been the story of the year,” said Michael Altfest, director of community engagement at the Alameda County Food Bank in Oakland, California.
Altfest said the level of community need remains 50% to 70% higher than pre-pandemic levels, and about 30% of calls to the food bank’s emergency helpline are from first-time callers.
In multiple cases, charities and food banks had prepared for increased numbers due to inflation, only to find the level of need had far exceeded their projections.
The Capital Area Food Bank in Washington originally projected it would need to distribute about 43 million meals during the July 2022-June 2023 budget year. Now four months into that fiscal year, it is already 22% ahead of those predictions.
“That was an educated prediction with a good four or five months of information,” said the food bank’s CEO, Radha Muthiah. “We are always thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas right when everybody’s heading to the beach in summer.”
In Illinois, Jim Conwell of the Greater Chicago Food bank says the need remains elevated. “So we’re purchasing more and we’re spending more on what we do purchase,” he said.
His organization’s network served about 30% more households in August 2022, compared to the previous August.
“Families that were just getting their feet back underneath them are experiencing a whole new challenge or even if they have employment, or have several jobs or sources of income, it’s just not going as far as it was two years ago,” he said.
Higher prices are forcing people to make “sacrifices on their food,” Altfest said.
For example, he said, the price of chicken has more than doubled — from 78 cents per pound last year to $1.64 per pound this year. Estimates from the Farm Bureau set the cost of turkey as 21 percent higher than last year. And market researcher Data assembly estimates that a 16-ounce box of stuffing costs 14% more than last year, while a 5-pound bag of Russet potatoes averages 45.5% more.
Mike Manning, president of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in Louisiana, draws a distinction between the increased hunger levels sparked by the pandemic and the current crisis. During the pandemic, millions of people’s jobs and incomes have essentially disappeared, creating an immediate wave of need that he compared to the aftermath of a hurricane.
But the current crisis has been a slow and steady rise, starting in late February and still climbing. Manning said his food bank has seen a 10% to 15% rise in local food insecurity in just the past two months.
“You’re talking to people who are on lower incomes and they’re working multiple jobs — just think of the cost of them to get from one job to the other with the gas eating
FDA Says Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat: What Is It?
“Farm-to-table” has long been a sought-after design for food—but “lab-to-table” might be the next trend for your favorite animal protein.
In a landmark ruling, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared lab-grown poultry for human consumption. On November 16, the FDA stated it had “no further questions” regarding the production of cell-cultured chicken by California’s Upside Foods.
This is the first time a US government agency has approved lab-grown meat, so there are plenty of questions surrounding its production, safety and availability. Wondering what lab-grown meat actually is, whether it’s safe, and when you might expect to see it on grocery store shelves? Here’s what we know so far.
Growing meat in a lab is a different process than traditional farming, to say the least—but the meat it creates is biologically the same as “real” chicken.
At Upside Foods, it all starts with a cell sample from a live chicken (hence lab-grown meat’s alternate names: cell-cultured meat or cultivated meat).
“[We take] a cell sample from an animal or fertilized egg and extract the cells that have the ability to grow into animal tissue or meat,” David Kay, Upside Foods’ director of communications, told Health. “From there, we put those cells into a large stainless steel tank called a cultivator that resembles beer-brewing equipment. We then provide the cells with the nutrients they need to grow and multiply.”
You might think of Upside’s chicken production process as the meat equivalent of growing plants in a greenhouse.
“Cultivating meat enables the same biological process that happens inside an animal by providing warmth and the basic elements needed to build muscle and fat: water, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals,” Maia Keerie, media and communications manager for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to alternative protein development, told Health.
Lab-grown meat has long been a dream in the minds of food innovators, but until now, government agencies have remained largely unclear about its suitability for human consumption. So what exactly does the FDA’s “no further questions” designation mean?
In brief, the FDA’s ruling means that Upside’s lab-grown chicken is safe for humans to eat because it doesn’t differ from regular chicken on a cellular level.
“In its rigorous pre-market safety review of Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken, the FDA did not identify any features of the cells as described that would render them different from other animal cells with respect to safety for food use,” said Keerie.
According to Kay, this ruling reflects Upside’s own determinations about the safety of their cell-cultured chicken.
“This landmark regulatory decision means that the FDA has accepted our safety conclusion, and Upside’s cultivated chicken will be available to consumers following USDA inspection and label approval,” he said.
Granted, eating chicken created in a stainless steel vat may sound a little odd. If you’re skeptical about the prospect of lab-grown poultry, you’re not alone. Some people have even expressed concern that cell-cultured meat could pose unforeseen health risks.
“The Center for Food Safety says that it’s unknown whether lab-grown meat will pose any more or fewer safety concerns than traditional meat,” Ashley Kitchens, RDN, owner of Plant Centered Nutrition, told Health. “There are arguments that, because lab-grown meat doesn’t have a fully functioning immune system, it’s at a higher risk of contamination.”
Still, Keerie contends that lab-grown meat could actually be superior to conventional meat for food safety.
“Antibiotics and antifungal agents are not used at all during the production process (but may be used in very small quantities during the pre-production phases). Therefore, cultivated meat will not contribute to antibiotic resistance and is likely to result in fewer incidences of foodborne illnesses,” she said. “For example, Upside’s cultivated chicken had very low microbial counts compared to conventional chicken and also tested negative for common foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella.”
Keerie also pointed out that many of the diseases humans encounter stem from problematic farming practices. (According to the CDC, three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases in humans come from animals.) Growing meat in a lab, rather than on a farm, could offer a solution.
“To reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases associated with animals, the cells used in cultivated meat production are carefully screened and confirmed to be absent of infectious pathogens including viruses, bacteria and other microbes,” said Keerie.
Besides their potential food safety benefits, engineered chicken and other meats have gotten a buzz for other pluses—most notably, their sustainability factor. Growing chicken meat in a lab uses far less resources than raising live chickens on a factory farm.
“When produced at scale using renewable energy, cultivated meat is projected to generate a fraction of the emissions and require a fraction of the land and water of conventional meat production,” said Kay.
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