cake’s gone rong
Someone who decorates cakes for a living should possess certain skills. Spelling is an important one. For example, success is not quite as sweet when the inscription reads, “Contralulation’s Ronan.” An eye for color helps, too. Piped dark brown swirls are never a good idea on a cake dotted with plastic farm animals. Finally, a few words about customer service: When someone requests that nothing be written on the cake, “NOTHING” should not be written on the cake.
“Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
After agribusiness co-opted his “5 ingredients” rule, Michael Pollan came up with a new rule of thumb for buying healthy food:
To boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.
So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
Hey, Mom, where’s for dinner?
(Via idsgn.)
from the comments: Babyfoot
Aaron inspired comment by Danny:
3 oz. Orange Juice
1 1/2 oz. Tuaca
1/2 oz. Kahlua
Shake over ice, then strain and serve in a chilled tommy-tippy-sippy-cup or a lidded cup with a curly straw (a.k.a.”a crazy straw”)
Good for inexperienced drinkers, clergy, and maiden aunts
Our Bodies, Our Flock: Mucus
Mucus is pretty nifty stuff. You don’t really think about it outside of your nose, but it’s good for whenever your body needs lube, it offers protection, and it’s pretty interesting chemically!
The average adult human produces about a liter of mucus in a day! With my allergies I think I’m probably above average. I have swallowed enough mucus today to necessitate two belches. It’s not very much fun.
(Part of a maybe ongoing series?)
Easter Biscuits
For India, bacon grease on the pan
“Experiments in disgusting Icelandic foods”
Hákarl: OMFG! this is the Nastiest! Shit!! EVAR!!! I downed the Brennevín and it didn’t help. I didn’t spit the hákarl out, but it took a lot of effort just to keep it in my mouth and chew a few times. I literally was choking it down. Ugh. The two couples were laughing so I offered them the rest. They thanked me as one of the men came over, took the bag and ripped it all the way open. “Maybe it’s bad hákarl,” he said. How could anyone tell the difference? He pulled a few chunks out with his fingers popped them in his mouth and while chewing, nodded his head in approval saying, “Mmph this is <chomp> good hákarl <chomp>” and passed the bag around the table.
The rest all had some and I decided to give it a second shot. Maybe it was just the initial shock of the smell. Maybe it was the anticipation. Maybe I just got one crappy piece. Or maybe I’m just an idiot.
It was even worse the second time, and I had no more Brennevín to help wash that awful taste out of my mouth. The vodka bottle was my friend much as Google is yours. Twice inside 26 hours I was putting the cleansing and restorative powers of Smirnoff 100° to good use.
The Iceland Diaries; more reviews of traditional Icelandic cuisine
Bonus: How to drive safely in Iceland
Brush Off the Fuzz and Dig In
Special Report — Today’s special: salmonella ‘n’ jelly sandwiches and tainted milk. Your choice of side dish includes cultured mayonnaise rind, fruit roll-up kimchee, or refrigerator-blackened cherry tomatoes.
Is the nation’s food supply at risk or are people just belly-aching?
Brooklyn Roof Goats, 1895
Last Monday morning Stenographer Hettrick of the Ewen street police court dropped his note book as he was running by the engine house to catch a Graham avenue trolley car. Billy got the book and turned over the papers with his tongue, looking for a choice morsel with which to tickle his palate. Billy had a remarkable digestive system, even for a goat, but a notebook, containing opinions, decisions, rulings, quotations from the classics, meditations uttered in Latin, lectures to delinquent husbands, advice to wayward girls, fatherly advice to boys who build bonfires in the streets, choice bits of poetry with which Judge Watson burdened the public record in a single day is enough to give a dozen Williamsburg goats dyspepsia. Billy ate the notebook at one meal.
He became very ill and hid himself in the darkest corner of the cellar.
A tragic tale from the April 15, 1895 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Melamine Shortage Could Undermine GM Bailout
The lame duck Bush Administration says it will authorize the purchase of 600,000 unwanted and unsold Chevrolet, GMC, Pontiac, Buick, and Saturn SUVs and donate them to former homeowners who defaulted on mortgages.
“Well, nobody can afford to buy those vehicles or fill them with gas,” said White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, or possibly Nancy Pfotenhauer, “but if you park them in the shade they make a cozy little living space. Kind of like camping.
Some difficult choices
I’ve been eating a lot of sushi lately, I offer by way of introduction to this post.
I have been thinking about something for the past day or so, albeit intermittently, I will admit. Here is the scenario. Please place, to the best of your ability, in order of worseness, from least worse to most worse, the following ways of being killed by an animal:
(a) By Snake: The snake will either wrap itself tightly around you, suffocating you to death in your shock and terror, or it will poison you and you will die painfully over several minutes or hours. Either way, you will think while you are dying about the fact that you will end up a human shaped lump inside a snakeskin covering, you will think of those large snake jaws unlocking and consuming you whole, and that what the poison or the snakemuscle didn’t get, the digestive juices would finish off.
(b) By bear: Mauled, torn limb from limb, eaten alive. Most likely done quite quickly, with the possibility of being ‘left for dead’ in some abandoned place, to die of hypothermia or your wounds.
(c) By crocodile: Depending on the appetite of the crocodile’s moment, you will probably be dragged and impaled on croc teeth for some time, maybe only halfarsedly eaten, maybe a leg pulled off of you and chewed up, the rest of you being left underneath a log or a large rock to be consumed at a more convenient time, later.
There is no hyena option.
I look forward to your responses.
Food in Chief
Michael Pollan, à la Wendall Berry (whom he quotes), argues for agricultural reform by decentralizing the food industry, encouraging organic farming, and bringing back crop rotation. This could increase food production by about 50%. But more pressing (politically, at least) is the environmental impact:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.
Wendall Berry’s collection of essays, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, is a worthy read for similar thoughts on the subject. (via Paideia)
Lena won’t share the good bits
The midpoint of a brief sequence.
She leaves me indigestible viscera and heads with beady black eyes.
Mommy made that ice cream
Frankly, the idea freaks me out a little:
“The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn’t make sense,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Everyone knows that ‘the breast is best,’ so Ben & Jerry’s could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk.”
Celebrities Struggling to Make Ends Meet
Some of the most prominent and glamorous celebrities are now forced to order their domestic staff to serve frozen creamed orphan on toast points or canned poached breast of bald eagle instead of fresh.
Meanwhile, average Americans who are not famous or popular or attractive are subsisting on diets of wienie water, dust bunnies, and grass clippings.
Catering the Rapture
Special Report — I think about food too much. I know I do. I acquired the tendency honestly.
When I was a little critter growing up in the compound, my mother elected herself nutritionist for our entire breakaway republic. There’s no telling what Mom would have achieved as Dietician-General if our fifty-two member group had seceded from the United States.
McDonald’s Discontinued Items
An interesting list of the discontinued menu items at McDonald’s. Do you remember any of these being advertised? I do.
Dinner Menu – In early 1990s a New Dinner Menu was tested for 6-12 months at two locations in New York and Tennessee. It consisted of the above mentioned pizza but also included lasagna, spaghetti, fettuccine alfredo, and roasted chicken as entrees. The side dishes included mashed potatoes and gravy and a vegetable medley. For the dessert it included a brownie a la mode.
Watermelons and Sex
The next time you want to make sexy time with your woman, consider watermelon instead of Viagra or Cialis:
A cold slice of watermelon has long been a Fourth of July holiday staple. But according to recent studies, the juicy fruit may be better suited for Valentine’s Day. That’s because scientists say watermelon has ingredients that deliver Viagra-like effects to the body’s blood vessels and may even increase libido.
Hot. Imagine the games you can play with the seeds.
16 things restaurants don’t want you to know
Men’s Health has posted a list of 16 Things Restaurants Don’t Want You to Know:
16. Sit-down chains don’t want you to know:
That their food is actually considerably worse for you than the often-maligned fast-food fare. In fact, our menu analysis of 24 national chains revealed that the average entree at a sit-down restaurant contains 867 calories, compared with 522 calories in the average fast-food entree. And that’s before appetizers, sides, or desserts—selections that can easily double your total calorie intake.
crime and punishment
The Vermont Supreme Court is deciding if nutraloaf, a mixture of “cubed whole wheat bread, nondairy cheese, raw carrots, spinach, seedless raisins, beans, vegetable oil, tomato paste, powdered milk and dehydrated potato flakes” is sustenance or cruel and unusual punishment.
It’s commonplace in other states as a way of providing nutrition in a mechanism that dissuades inmates from throwing feces, urine, trays and silverware. It tends to have the desired outcome. Once the offender relents, we stop with the nutraloaf.
seeds, fertilizer & credit
On Non-Ironic Carhartts
A curmudgeon I know holds forth:
Commentary on the state of farming can be found in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. ‘Twas ever thus: The Egg and I, the farming stories of S. J. Perelman, and, of course, Green Acres. Young folks find their way back to the garden, learn about life, cold hard economics, early mornings in freezing rain, etc.
But it’s in the styles section, along with the wedding announcements and stories on relationships, probably for a good reason: this “trend” amounts to a few anecdotes and will only affect the finances of a few. In some ways it’s a typical fashion story, one that gets as irritating as all the ones I’ve read in the past forty years.
pharma-water
A good nutritionist friend of mine says everyone should invest in a full-house water filtration system, because no matter how you cut it, our water supply is polluted and only getting worse. It’s easy to dismiss such hyperbolic claims, but then this comes along and you realize that’s a second head growing on your shoulder:
How do the drugs get into the water?
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies — which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public — have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.
At this point, I doubt any filtration system would be able to address this 100%.
Yum! Brands, McDonald’s Fight Back: Bite Us, China!
Chinese food.
Louisville, KY — In a surprising circumstance certain to offset recent reports of contaminated Chinese products flooding the U.S. market, fast-food giants McDonald’s and Yum! Brands announced markedly increased expansion of Asian-based profits and waistlines.
“It’s a way of maintaining parity with offshore competition,” said a Louisville, KY McDonald’s shift manager whose name could not be recalled by his own employees. “They poison us with lead and melamine; we hit back with cholesterol and trans fat.”
Oil Crisis
We were talking about food today.
I guess I got all wound up tonight and cooked the hell out of some stuff. My family only eats meat a couple of nights a week, and this was a carnivore evening:
