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A periodic table of awesomeness featuring Bacon as element #1, Laser as #21, and Black Holes as #82. I like bacon. Bacon is a close personal friend of mine. But can’t we keep this overexposed pork product out of it for once? (via rw)
How hot dogs are made. It’s true, sometimes you don’t want to know how the sausage gets made. (via cyn-c)
This amazing Bento box featuring Wall-E is only one of many such creations by AnnaTheRed. (thx, fiona)
Eat me daily rounds up a recent AIGA event about food. The most interesting tidbit came from Matteo Bologna’s speech. Bologna designs restaurants, most notably for Keith McNally (Pastis, Balthazar, Morandi, Schillers, etc.).
Really fascinating was what he and McNally did for Pastis — it doesn’t actually have a visual brand. McNally wanted the restaurant to look like it had been in the neighborhood for years, so Bologna constructed this narrative of a family that had maintained the restaurant for a century, and each generation some element gets updated or redesigned, but without going for consistency or even style. The result is completely different-looking signage, awnings, menus, wine lists, checks… everything uses a different palette, type set, but its essential Frenchiness ties everything together. It’s an anti-brand.
The name of the restaurant is thus a play on pastiche in addition to being named after the French aperitif. (via eater)
Video of the inner workings of a mostly automatic Irish frozen pizza factory. I like the tomato sauce shooter (the way it tracks along with the pizzas briefly as they whiz by on the conveyor belt) and the writhing pepperoni sticks.
Update: Inside an Austrian bread factory where they still made bread by hand.
More on the Saigon Grill saga: the owners were arrested yesterday on over 400 counts of “violating minimum-wage laws, falsifying business records and defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance system”.
“Like so many restaurants across New York City, Saigon Grill was run on the backs of its workers,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “These workers allowed the business to thrive, and in exchange they were allegedly cheated out of wages, fined for ridiculous reasons” and, he said, “pulled into a painstaking ploy to cover it all up.”
(thx, nick)
The ridiculously giant Carnegie Deli pastrami sandwich (retail: $14.95) contains enough meat to make at least 5 normal-sized sandwiches.
Update: There’s a Flickr group called Campaign for a Sensible Sandwich. (thx, dunstan)
The Food Timeline shows which foods were invented when. Ok, not invented, exactly, but first eaten. A tasting menu:
Pretzels, 5th century AD.
Pork and beans, 1475.
Foie gras, 1st century AD.
Croissants, 1686.
Chop suey, 1896.
Popcorn, 3600 BC.
Swedish meatballs, 1754.
(via snarkmarket)
Harper’s has a translated excerpt from a 1942 letter detailing a list of recipes used by the residents of Leningrad during the city’s blockage by the Nazis in WWII (subscribers only). In addition to mustard cakes and leather-belt soup, here’s this:
Soup from pets and domesticated animals
Meat is ranked by taste in the following order: dog, guinea pig, cat, rat. Gut the carcass, wash well and place in cold water. Add salt. Cook for one to three hours. For aroma: bay leaf, pepper, any sort of herbs, and, if available, grain.
Mark Bittman talks about the problems with overfishing and the prospect that in the future, most or all of the fish we eat will be farmed.
The biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back — dead — as “bycatch.”)
This infographic about overfishing is worth a look. It’s a pity that Bittman felt compelled to write this from the “snob” point of view (which was exacerbated by the editor’s choice of title). As the article makes clear, overfishing is an important issue that affects the earth’s entire population, not just a few picky fish eaters.
The amount of spam email decreased by more than 66% last week after a single company was knocked offline by their ISP after the Washington Post dug into their activities. But sales of Spam, the midwestern delicacy, are up, up, up because of the crappy economy.
Through war and recession, Americans have turned to the glistening canned product from Hormel as a way to save money while still putting something that resembles meat on the table. Now, in a sign of the times, it is happening again, and Hormel is cranking out as much Spam as its workers can produce.
In a factory that abuts Interstate 90, two shifts of workers have been making Spam seven days a week since July, and they have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely.
People are also buying fewer socks and more frozen pot pies. And Spam can be added to the list of unlikely economic indicators, joining sushi, Big Macs, cigarettes, and others.
Update: Oh, and lipstick.
An indicator based on the theory that a consumer turns to less expensive indulgences, such as lipstick, when she (or he) feels less than confident about the future. Therefore, lipstick sales tend to increase during times of economic uncertainty or a recession.
(thx, dann)
A timeline of the greatest American breakfast cereals, from Grape Nuts in 1897 to Cheerios in 1941 to the present day. (via geek out new york)
Post-Halloween, an attempt to determine a candy hierarchy.
Still no unanimous decision on the placement of Candy Corn, which as of 2006 remained unclassified, but as of 2007 had been tentatively placed in the Upper Chewy/Upper Devonian. 2008: no sighting.
The top tier is comprised of Caramellos, Milky Way, Snickers, Rolos, and Twix. Rolos? Please. Sub Peanut Butter Cups in there and you’ve got yourselves a pyramidal apex.
What I Learned Today is reading the labels of the food she consumes to see what’s in them and then researching each component. First up, her yogurt.
cultured pasteurized grade A low fat milk: It’s cultured, which means bacteria has been added to it to ferment the lactose and galactose (milk sugars) and convert them into lactic acid. Milk is fermented in order to increase the shelf-life, add taste, and increase digestibility. It’s pasteurized, which means it’s been heated to destroy some viable pathogens. It’s Grade A, meaning it complies with the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments “Grade A” milk program, which is based on the FDA’s Pasteurized Milk Ordinance requirements to be shipped interstate. It’s low fat which mean it’s gone through a centrifuge which separates the fat from the the rest of the product.
Even food ingredient labels become literature with many layers when governmental agencies and large food companies get involved. That’s a lot of information disseminated in so few words.
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