Being a kitchen-gear crazy, I like to think that I'm pretty up on what's out there, but the other night I realized that sometimes you've got to go back to stay ahead. I was watching a very early episode of The French Chef, Julia Child's groundbreaking television series of the 1960s, and there she was, majestic and warbly, expounding on the lowly spud and wielding a mashing fork, a gizmo I'd never laid eyes on. It looked like a kitchen fork that had been bent by one-too-many mash-ups with a tater, but, in fact, the bend was built-in, the better to press the tubers into chunky submission.]]>Thu, 08 May 2008 15:51:39 -0700nospam@example.com (bon appétit Magazine)http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/food/back-to-basics-the-mashing-fork-167654/#commentshttp://shine.yahoo.com/channel/food/back-to-basics-the-mashing-fork-167654/http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/food/silence-of-the-lambs-the-rising-cost-of-meat-167434/Draguignan, France: Robert, the butcher with the bedside manner, was uncharacteristically customerless on a Saturday market morning. The aging ladies who once jammed his shop were now pushing carts at Carrefour. In his meat locker, Robert delivered a loving pat to the plump withers of a clover-fed Sisteron lamb that should have been sharing a plate with tender green beans as someone's gigot. "In a few years," he told me, "these will be a fond memory."

We've all read the depressing accounts of vanishing fish stocks from the world's oceans due to overfishing, global warming, and a number of other factors (read all about it here, here, and here). If our children's children have any hope of eating seafood, aquaculture and farm-raised fish must play an important role. The jury is still out on some farm-raised fish and shellfish (here) but there are some success stories including the oyster industry.