Monday, January 05, 2009
Strange News from the Food Front (1/5/2009)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities (and an apology for a delay in posts caused by repeated Blogger.com outages):
- Cracker Cash Proving that snacking can be rewarding, a California couple found $10,000 in a box of crackers. (AP)
- Brain Busted Supermarkets know a whole lot more about how you shop than you might like. (The Economist)
- Decaf Detection A new product lets you test whether the coffee you're drinking is decaf or hitest. (MedGadget)
- Somewhere Over the Rainbow Manhattan's famous Rainbow Room has closed. (AP)
- God Made Her Do It A New York judge ruled that religious duty doesn't excuse smuggling monkey meat into the country. (AP)
- Now That's a Pour Someone built a device to achieve the perfect beer pour. Does it drink, as well? (Engadget)
- Top Tuna Two sushi bar owners in Japan paid more than $100,000, or $370 a pound, for a blue fin tuna. (AP)
- Big Bread A 22,000 pound bread was part of the Magi celebration in Mexico. (AFP)
Monday, December 22, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (12/22/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Soda Subsidy New York's governor proposed a 15 percent "obeisity tax" on non-diet sodas. (New York Daily News via Crispy on the Outside)
- Food Fight For the second time in a month, a Florida man was arrested in part for throwing food at his girlfriend. (AP)
- Apple Apples A Japanese farmer puts stickers on some of his apples so they grow with Apple logos or iPod outlines. (CNET)
- Lotsa Latkes In Hanukkah news, a student ate 46 latkes - or seven pounds - to win an eating contest on Long Island. (AP)
- Legal Sweet Tooth A lawyer gets arrested for feeding a piece of candy to his shackled client in court. (AP)
- Burger Body Bath Burger King has a men's body spray that makes the wearer smell "like flame-broiled meat." Eww. (Crispy on the Outside)
- Cut-Rate Caviar Police in Milan seized 88 lbs. of smuggled caviar and are giving it to the poor. Wonder if they're also providing the blinis. (Reuters)
Monday, December 15, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (12/8/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Drinkable Art A start-up prints images in caramel on latte foam. (Boston Globe)
- Kentucky Kleaning Some KFC workers got into trouble for bathing in sinks used for cleaning dishes. Hey, at least they were clean when working. (AP)
- Better than a Gallic Shrug A French literature major, having worked as a grocery store checkout clerk, has parlayed the experience into a best-selling memoir in France. (Washington Post)
- Power of Pepperoni A pizza delivery man, finding himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel, fought back with a hot pepperoni pizza (AP)
- Don't Ask About the Hole A man working without pants at a drive-through doughnut shop gets probation. (AP)
- China Gets First Michelin Star Of course, the obvious line would be that an hour later the restaurant in question would want another one. (Financial Times)
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (12/8/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime (Or Ten) New Yorkers are tipping less, and that's tough on the restaurant crowd. (New York Magazine)
- Drink and Watch Someone has come out with a combination beer tap and LCD television. All it needs is a fridge. (Engadget)
- Double Points for Side Dish Cooking titles (you can fillet a fish on one, oh joy, or rapture) are popping out for game consoles. (Washington Post)
- Soup and Shawl A temporary Manhattan store selling independent designer lines is also serving soup. (AP)
- Free Market Coffee A libertarian, barrista, and contributor to Crispy on the Outside considers the economic and aesthetic implications of Starbucks. (Doublethink Online)
- One Hump or Two? Australians are being told to eat camels to stop global warming. No, I can't make this up. (AFP)
- Did You Check Your Pockets? The Moroccan subsidiary of McDonald's had to apologize for distributing maps, as part of a Happy Meal, that didn't show Western Sahara. (AFP)
Monday, December 01, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (12/1/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Bootleg Russian Vodka The economy is hitting Russia hard, and many hard-drinking Russians are having to forgo commercial vodka, sometimes substituting dangerous homemade brew. (Reuters)
- Zero-G Coffee Cup An astronaut has developed a cup for drinking coffee in zero gravity - good for when you're orbiting the planet, or in the middle of a very steep drop in your car. (Space.com)
- Take the Coffee to Go Cafes are closing at a rate of two a day in France. (NYT)
- Foul Fiend Flailed with Frozen Fowl An alleged carjacker was stopped from stealing a woman's car when another shopper clubbed him with a frozen turkey. (AP)
- Patent Pending Panini McDonald's is apparently trying to patent a way of making sandwiches. Ingredients held between two slices of bread - who would have thought it? (Slashdot.org)
- Fierce Flatulence A 13-year-old Florida student was arrested for disrupting his classroom by turning off the computers of other students and by passing gas. (AP)
- Sweet Jesus German church authorities are reacting negatively to a man who's making a business of casting chocolate versions of the baby Jesus, wrapped in gold foil. (Reuters)
- Online Food Forensics An Australian restaurant owner tracked down five young people who ordered a large meal and then skipped out on the bill by finding them on Facebook. (Reuters)
- Plummeting Pumpkins Hundreds of people on Long Island, NY paid $9 each to several hundred pumpkins being tossed from a second floor to splatter on the ground below. (AP)
- Thanksgiving Theft A thief stole the entire Thanksgiving dinner from the porch of a Wisconsin family. (AP)
Monday, November 24, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (11/24/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- A Pizza Too Far A video of someone's chocolate-covered bacon candy pizza. What more can you say? (Crispy on the Outside)
- TV Pizza Staying on the theme of places that pizza should not go, you can order a Domino's pie on your TiVO. (Silicon Alley Insider)
- Special Samosas A couple visiting India paid over $200 for four samosas. The shop owner explained away the price claiming that the fritters had "special" herbs that acted as aphrodisiacs. (Reuters)
- Two, Please Canada's Supreme Court upheld that obese people have a right to two seats on domestic flights. Do they also get seconds on the meal? (Reuters)
- Tons of Kimchi Thousands of volunteers in Seoul made 143 tons of kimchi in a bid for a world record. Unfortunately, the Guinness Book of World Records doesn't have an appropriate category. (AP)
- Meat Police Framingham, MA police don't know why someone is leaving top quality cuts of meat on the town commons. (AP)
- Revealing Phone A McDonald's patron in Arkansas left his cell phone behind him after a trip, clearly forgetting that he had nude photos of his wife on it. (AP)
- Whatchamacall It? Restaurants are considering alternatives to the term "restaurant" because it apparently causes already budget-minded consumers to tighten their purses even more. (Financial Times)
Monday, November 17, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (11/17/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Wash Hands After Eating Greasy fingerprints on an orange juice bottle left at the scene of a break-in helped lead police to the culprit. (AP)
- Mexican Giant Bread of Death It's actually what it says. Ten feet of bread is a whole lot for $137. (Crispy on the Outside)
- Bake Sale Police The government push for healthier foods is threatening the existence of the school bake sale. (New York Times)
- That Tastes Like ... Oh. It Is. NASA is using a water recycling system, to purify urine into potable water, to handle larger crews on the international space station. (Reuters)
- Pumpkin Seed Aphrodisiac? An Austrian covered pumpkin seeds in chocolate, but then colored them blue and named them Styriagra. Now Pfizer is suing, saying that he's trying to make them look like little, blue Viagra pills. (AFP)
- Too Big for Prison to Hold A 490 pound gang member got sprung from a Canadian prison because he was too large for his cell. (Reuters)
- Food Records Feature On the fourth-annual Guinness World Records Day, food played an important part in a number of new records, such as the largest tea bag (hopefully inspiring the largest tea cup), and the fastest time to peel and eat a kiwi fruit (16.15 secionds). (AFP)
- EU Permits Wonky Fruit, Veggies The European Union, in its bureaucratic wisdom, has decided that bent cucumbers and other malformed fruits and vegetables may be sold in markets. (AFP)
- Tequila as Precious Jewels Researchers have reportedly found a way to turn tequila into diamonds. (The Guardian)
- Nestlé Pans Soda Nestlé has started anti-soda marketing to help increase sales on its bottled water brand as people, hit by the financial crisis, turn to tap. And then you can have a chocolate chaser to help keep the weight off. (Wall Street Journal)
Monday, November 10, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (11/10/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Bloodhounds Follow Pork Swiss police, acting on reports from motorists, had bloodhounds follow a long trail of blood that turned out to be a butcher's van with an overturned barrel of pork headed to a sausage factory (AP)
- Workers Unite at Your Fridges A U.K. nonprofit is urging people not to buy sandwiches at work but to bring leftovers from the previous night's dinner. (Daily Mail)
- They Have Expensive Tastes Chef Jamie Oliver, who really should stop making social pronouncements, claims that Britons don't know how to cook inexpensively at home, so aren't ready for an economic downturn. (Reuters)
- Soup for Spot Berlin has a soup kitchen intended strictly for dogs. (Reuters)
- But the Flavor Lasts so Long A man tried to pay his bar tab with chewing gum wrappers. (AP)
- All Hail Spud It's the international year of the potato. Have a Yukon Gold to lunch. (AFP)
- Mushrooming Music A Swiss researcher claims that he has duplicated the sound of a Stradivarious violin by treating a replica with mushrooms. (AFP)
Monday, October 27, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (10/27/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Taco With Weed A Colorado couple found that their take-out Tex-Mex food order included a bag of marijuana. (AP)
- Charm of Coffee Researchers say that even holding a cup of hot coffee can can warm the heart and not just the hands. (Reuters)
- Barkeep, a Two-Thirds, Please The U.K. is considering a measure that would allow bars to sell two-third pint glasses instead of only a full or half pint for those times when the one is too much and the other not enough. (Reuters)
- Turn Back the Clock and Prices A Manhattan restuarant hit its 100th anniversary and for the day set dishes back to 1908 prices. (AFP)
- Fat and Glad-iator It seems that Roman gladiators fattened up on carbs. (Crispy on the Outside)
Monday, October 20, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (10/20/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Forget Stocks - Try Barrels The stock market may be taking a beating, but the World Whiskey Index has seen an average return of 26.2 percent over the last 11 months. That's putting your money where your mouth is. (Reuters)
- Use the Tape Faster Next Time A group of Iranians built what they hoped would be the world's largest sandwich, but before representatives of the Guiness Book of World Records could measure it, bystanders rushed in and ate the evidence. (Reuters)
- Burger with Everything - Literally A man took well over four hours to eat a 15 pound burger that, with toppings and all, topped out at 20.2 pounds. (AP)
- Not the Nuts - Police have warned thieves that stole 660 pounds of hazelnuts not to eat them because the sacks they're in are filled with a poisonous gas to extend the shelf life and they need additional treatment to be safe to eat. (Reuters)
- Don't Drink the Stew - About 170 wedding guests in northern China were rushed to the hospital after someone decided to flavor a pot of stew with powdered rust remover, mistaking it for salt. (Reuters)
Monday, October 13, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (10/13/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- A Slice or 45 Competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut just won a pizza eating contest, downing 45 slices in 10 minutes. That's even more than a teenage boy. (AP)
- Assault by Cake A Hartford, CT woman was charged with assault and various other activities for allegedly serving a pot-spiked gingercake to her real estate agent. Maybe she wanted a higher price? (AP)
- To Choose, Look Down The tabletops of an upscale London restaurant are giant touch-screen displays that let you see the food and then order it. (Evening Standard)
- Bad Wine? Wait 30 Minutes An inventor has found a way to "age" wine in under an hour using ultrasound. (London Telegraph)
Monday, October 06, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (10/6/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Food Stars at Ig Nobel One of the winners of this year's Ig Nobel Awards, an honoring of real but weird research, was someone who showed that Coca-Cola was a good spermicide and that people will enjoy stale potato chips so long as they crunch loudly enough. (Reuters)
- End of Free Naked Lunch A Maine restaurant had been offering a free lunch to people who would jump naked into a nearby lake (probably setting their teeth chattering so much that they wouldn't be able to eat), but has dropped the promotion when the town offered to drop his liquor permit. (AP)
- It's Good for You A zoo in central China has been feeding chicken soup to its pandas. And what of the matzo balls? (AP)
- Hair of the Horse A man in Kazakhstan beat a drunken-driving rap because he had consumed fermented mare's milk, not beer or liquor. (AP)
- Ballsy Cooking A Serbian chef has come out with a cookbook focused on recipes using testicles as an ingredient. (AFP)
Monday, September 29, 2008
Strange News from the Food Front (9/29/2008)
A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:
- Take Out for Locked In Egyptian prisoners are being allowed to order delivered food. (Reuters)
- Farm Portrait An Ohio farmer, who regularly cuts a corn maze into his field (a big fall activity for those of us living in rural areas) this year had it designed to look like a portrait of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. (AP)
- What's in a Wine Name? In another politically tinged story, a small winery in Chile has a wine that was called Palin before the governor of Alaska became so prominent, but has found that sales are off. If only it had been beer. (AP)
- Mom's Milk Ice Cream As a publicity stunt (and a pretty good one), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which opposed commercial milk production, called on Ben and Jerry's to make an ice cream out of human milk. (AP)
- Pickle Piccolo? A ten year old group plays music on instruments made of vegetables. (AFP)
