Budget,
Backpackers,
Surfers,
Beach Lovers,
Naturalist,
Hippie,
Sun and Sand worshipers,
Off the Beaten Path Paradise! Everyone is welcome at Zipolite!
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A little about Playa Zipolite, The Beach of the Dead . . .
Playa Zipolite, Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, on the Pacific Ocean. A little bit about my favorite little get-away on this small world of ours.
Zipolite, a sweaty 30-minute walk west from Puerto Angel, brings you to Playa Zipolite and another world. The feeling here is 1970's - Led Zep, Marley, and scruffy gringos.
A long, long time ago, Zipolite beach was usually visited by the Zapotecans...who made it a magical place. They came to visit Zipolite to meditate, or just to rest.
Recently, this beach has begun to receive day-trippers from Puerto Angel and Puerto Escondido, giving it a more TOURISTY feel than before.
Most people come here for the novelty of the nude beach, yoga, turtles, seafood, surf, meditation, vegetarians, discos, party, to get burnt by the sun, or to see how long they can stretch their skinny budget.
I post WWW Oaxaca, Mexico, Zipolite and areas nearby information. Also general budget, backpacker, surfer, off the beaten path, Mexico and beyond, information.
VENUE La Meridiana, Calle Paseo Mitla, Santa María Huatulco, Mexico
EVENT DETAILS
NEW YEAR'S APERITIVO ITALIANO - LA MERIDIANA
Este mes l'Aperitivo Italiano de La Meridiana será obviamente dedicado a estas fiestas! Será además una ocasión para saludarnos y felicitarnos para la llegada del nuevo año. Esta vez podrán encontrarán algunas espcialidades de la tradición italiana y disfrutar de un delicioso Prosecco. Precio: $100 copa de vino + comida, y $80 copa de vino. This month the Aperitivo Italiano @ Meridiana will be more special than ever! It will also be an occasion to say Bye Bye all together to this year and greet each other. This time you will find some of the dishes of the Italian tradition and a delicious Prosecco. Price: $100 glass of wine + food, $80 just the glass of wine.
Locust Taco: Though taboo in the West, the eating of insects is commonplace for 2 billion people worldwide
The beady eyes in my taco glare back amid the citrus salsa and avocado, and peek out from behind a leaf of cilantro. The first bite is crunchy, and faintly nutty, like toasted corn — if toasted corn came with six legs and a pair of wings. Before long I’m popping individual fried locusts into my mouth like peanuts.
Ilan Ben Zion
Suspicious Snack: Now wingless and fried, the creatures go down like peanuts.
But this isn’t a street stall in Oaxaca, Mexico. I’m in my Jerusalem apartment and my girlfriend is having a conniption over the pile of disembodied grasshopper legs I’ve left on the chopping board in the kitchen. Over the phone, my mother’s revulsion is barely assuaged by the fact that — perhaps bizarrely — these critters are kosher.
Ilan Ben Zion
Wings of Desire? The author’s girlfriend wasn’t thrilled about the collection of locusts in her kitchen.
Though taboo in the West, entomophagy — the eating of insects — is commonplace for an estimated 2 billion people worldwide, from Japan to Mexico and most places in between. Locusts are also mentioned in the Bible as being kosher for Jews to eat, with some communities maintaining the tradition of eating insects down through the 20th century. In a 2013 report, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization urged developed countries to rethink insect consumption, pointing out that insects produce less methane and other greenhouse gases than typical domesticated animals, are more efficient at converting feed into protein, consume considerably less water, don’t require as much land and are healthier than beef, poultry or pork.
One Israeli start-up is joining the growing ranks of companies seeking to develop viable ways to raise edible insects for an increasingly ravenous world.
Elifelet is an unlikely place for a food revolution. The quiet farming community of 614 people in the hills north of the Sea of Galilee seems a long way from Tel Aviv skyscrapers of Start-up Nation. But this moshav in northern Israel has the rare distinction of being home to Hargol FoodTech and the world’s largest commercial grasshopper farm. The company is forging ahead to expand production to meet burgeoning demand.
Courtesy of Hargol Food Tech
Bring on the Locusts: An Israeli start-up is seeking to develop viable ways to raise edible insects for an increasingly ravenous world.
Construction workers were busy as bees on Sunday converting disused chicken coops into climate-controlled incubation and growth chambers for hundreds of thousands of Locusta migratoria — the African migratory locust. Once completed, the building will be capable of turning out 10 tons of edible locusts per year. Other adjoining sheds will undergo the same overhaul to ramp up output to meet Hargol’s target of producing millions of locusts annually.
Hargol has caught the attention of major food corporations worldwide and last month it took first prize in an Israeli startup award competition. It has drawn investors from Israel and abroad and aims to have a fully operational industrial farm up and running by mid 2018.
Courtesy of Hargol Food Tech
Hargol Food Tech Team: (left to right) Dror Tamir, Ben Friedman, Chanan Aviv
“Demand for protein is continuously rising, and the existing sources of protein are either unhealthy for people or the planet, or both,” said Dror Tamir, Hargol’s jocular CEO, when we met at the company’s facility in Elifelet. “We’re following a basic principle: The smaller the animal, the more efficient.”
Tamir speaks cryptically about Hargol’s closely guarded innovations that have enabled the company to reduce egg incubation time from 10 months to two weeks. A gentle munching pervades the humid white-walled chamber where cage upon cage of locusts are stacked. Each cage contains hundreds of the insects in different stages of development. The optimal conditions inside the farm enable locusts, which are fed on a diet of organic hydroponic wheatgrass, to mature from egg to harvestable adult in just six weeks — abreakthrough that makes mass production commercially feasible.
Courtesy of Hargol FoodTech
Gourmet Grasshopper: From pest to protein powder.
Once mature and ready to harvest, the locusts are frozen. The cold kills the invertebrates painlessly. The company will market both whole locusts, which Tamir says will be roughly a third of Hargol’s output, and neutral protein powder for food manufacturers. Hargol’s prospective customers have already put in pre-orders for hundreds of tons of whole grasshoppers for insect snacks, as well as “energy bars, sports shakes, pasta sauces, cookies and chips. You name it,” Tamir said. “They’re just waiting for us to supply them in bulk.” The company expects to ship the first bulk orders in the first quarter of 2018.
In addition, Tamir said Hargol’s operations have drawn the interest of PepsiCo, Coca Cola, IKEA, Diaggio, Glanbia, General Mills, Whole Foods and others food giants. Several of these companies are already exploring future insect additives to food products.
While the idea of corn chips made with grasshopper powder may not immediately sound like the most appealing snack, it could hypothetically still be kosher and halal. Leviticus 11 lists certain species of grasshopper that are permissible for Jews to eat. In the New Testament, the Book of Mark recalls that John the Baptist ate “locusts and wild honey” in the wilderness. They are also considered halal, and Muslims across the Arab world consume jarad, the Arabic term for locusts, wherever they appear.
For centuries, Jews of Morocco, Algeria and Yemen maintained the tradition of feasting on the desert locust — Schistocerca gregaria — while the Jews of Europe ceased consuming them, explained Zohar Amar, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, whose specialty includes identifying flora and fauna from the Bible.
“From a Halachic perspective, [locusts] have the same standing as fish,” he said. They do not require kosher slaughter and are considered pareve — neither meat nor milk. Amar notes that while Yemenite Jews such as himself unequivocally deem desert locusts kosher, the tradition concerning migratory locusts — like those raised by Hargol — is more ambiguous.
The tradition of eating locusts is dying out, partly because locust swarms reach Israel less frequently thanks to international efforts, and partly because Israeli Jews have embraced Western cultural food norms.
“The cultural problem is more troublesome, because today Western culture dominates us,” Amar said, and that has impressed taboos about eating insects onto Israeli culture. “Even if I have a tradition from my grandfather and my grandson sees it, he knows it’s not acceptable in society.” Much of his research, Amar said, is for the sake of preserving that tradition for future generations.
For a fair skinned Jew uninitiated into such traditions, cooking locust was an adventure meal that required some psyching up. Before boiling them for 20 minutes, there’s the grisly task of removing wings and legs. The critters undergo a lobster-like transformation in their hot bath, emerging reddish. Once dried, they are fried. They emerge crispy and then get tossed with salt and spices. They are then consumed, carapace and all.
Though such a snack could easily take off as the newest trendy bite in a city like Tel Aviv, Hargol’s founders have set their sights on exporting to American and European markets. But even if those populations remain squeamish about eating insects, Tamir is not too worried: “If not the U.S. and Europe, then there’s always Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Tanzania, Mexico and many other places.”
“We’re at the very tip of the iceberg,” said Tamir. “We’re just trying right now to dramatically expand production to meet demand for the basic products.”
Ilan Ben Zion is a freelance writer based in Israel. He is a reporter at the Associated Press and a news editor at The Times of Israel.
Elaborate displays of radish sculptures attract thousands of people as Oaxacan radish artists compete for prizes in the annual Night of the Radishes. The event has its roots in the Spanish colonial period, when farmers began carving their radishes to attract buyers to the Christmas market. Local priests ...
Work on Oaxaca-Puerto Escondido highway set to restart. By Angeles Rodriguez Wednesday, December 27, 2017. BNamericas. Notify me Bookmark. Share ... Work on the coastal highway in the Mexican state of Oaxaca is set to resume early next year, according to press .
Chahuites is in an isolated part of southern Oaxaca, about 170 miles north of the Guatemalan border. Migrants from Central America used to just pass through town riding on top of La Bestia, the train migrants traditionally traveled on across Mexico. But now immigration agents patrol the train, forcing ...
$500-million sale provides only brief respite for weakening peso
Mexico News Daily | Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Efforts to support the Mexican peso amid a slump that has seen it trading at around 20 to the US dollar have failed to apply the brakes on the tumbling currency.
The Bank of México (Banxico) auctioned off an unscheduled US $500 million in foreign exchange hedges yesterday, a measure designed to ease pressure on the peso. But it only provided brief respite before the currency slumped again to end the day at 20.15 pesos per dollar.
The central bank took the decision on the advice of the Foreign Exchange Commission, a body made up of officials from the Finance Secretariat (SHCP) and Banxico that is responsible for foreign exchange policy in Mexico.
It explained its motivations to intervene via press release.
“With the objective of fostering better liquidity conditions, better price discovery and orderly operation [of the exchange market], the commission has decided to instruct the Bank of México to sell exchangeable currency hedges today [yesterday] for the value in national currency of US $500 million,” it said.
The central bank placed US $250 million in a 30-day forward contract and the other US $250 million in a 57-day forward contract.
If the peso has declined further by the time the contracts mature, Banxico will have to pay the difference in pesos but if the currency goes up, it will receive the difference.
The measure allows the central bank to support the exchange market without eating into Mexico’s international reserves, currently valued at around US $172.5 billion.
Analysts have attributed the dip to high inflation, the threat to investment posed by tax reform in the United States and government corruption scandals that could benefit presidential aspirant Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
But analysts from Banorte-Ixe said that yesterday’s measure showed that the SHCP and Banxico recognized that the recent increase in volatility was largely the result of the US $1.5 trillion tax cut package signed into law last week by United States President Donald Trump.
The chief economic analyst at Banco Base, Gabriela Siller, said the exchange rate would remain vulnerable in 2018 due to speculation related to the July 1 presidential election.
“The first half of 2018 is shaping up as a period of greater exchange volatility because of the presidential elections,” she said, adding that uncertainty surrounding the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was another factor.
Bank of México Governor Alejandro Díaz de León said in an interview published by the newspaper El Financiero today that the peso faces an “adverse environment” in 2018 due to U.S. fiscal reform, NAFTA renegotiations and the Mexican presidential election.
The SHCP and Banxico will continue to closely monitor the foreign exchange market and some analysts believe that they will continue to intervene in the same way as yesterday if required.
In February, the Foreign Exchange Commission announced a US $20-billion hedging program to enable a more orderly functioning of the foreign exchange market.
The move came a month after the peso plunged to 22 pesos to the US dollar just before President Trump was sworn in.
