Gigabiting

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Inside the school cafeteria

It’s just like you remember: loud and chaotic, lunch ladies in hairnets, pizza Fridays. The lines are long, the meat is still a mystery, and most of what’s brought from home gets tossed.

Less familiar are the trading bans and peanut-free zones to accommodate allergies, the absence of any actual cooking, and the runaway rates of childhood obesity and diabetes.

The National School Lunch Program provides commodities and subsidies to public and private schools that offer free or reduced-price meals. This year’s subsidy was $2.68 for each free lunch down to 25¢ for full-priced lunches. At that rate, most districts can afford food costs of about 90¢ for each lunch served. Read entire article.

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Food trucks were the darlings of the food world in 2009.

Take the recessionary economy. Add in the food savvy to swap withered hot dogs for trendy dishes like red velvet cupcakes or the Asian-fusion of Korean tacos. Give it a boost of tech savvy with Twittered locations and daily specials. And that’s how street food grew into a full-fledged culinary phenomenon.

Street food has the intrinsic charm of a communal, democratic experience. It’s cheap and casual with no dress code or reservations required. It is also hurried and messy. Instead of a maitre d’ to seat you, you have to cop a squat on a bench or curb. There are squirt bottle condiments, flimsy plastic cutlery, and the ambiance of the streets, with its attendant bus fumes, car alarms, and weather.

Ultimately, street food proved to be a little too street for many of us.

That’s why this year’s trend is the gentrification of street food. Read entire article.

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• it’s relaxing
• it’s affordable
• there’s still plenty of time to worry about fitting into your swimsuit

Why not go on a picnic?

What do you mean you hate picnics? I suppose you don’t like puppies, rainbows, or ice cream either!

We’re not talking about something out of an episode of Survivor; just a patch of green and a sack of food. No forced march, no cooking over fire. You don’t even have to touch a frisbee if you don’t want to.

Just one requirement: you gotta go green. All of those cups and plates and little plastic forks add up to an awful lot of trash, much of it the kind that sits for all eternity in a landfill. There’s no excuse for all of that waste. With plenty of eco-friendly choices, nearly everything at your picnic can be reused, recycled, or composted. Read entire article.

Customer in French restaurant: Do you have frogs’ legs?
Waiter: Yes Sir.
Customer: Then hop into the kitchen and get me a ham sandwich!

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What satisfies like a sandwich?

.At its most basic, a sandwich is two slices of bread enclosing a filling. Those fillings can be hearty, refined, exotic, or homey. The sandwich is a blank canvas on which to paint the colors and contours of the world around us.

The sandwich canon expands with each new wave of immigration. The format is flexible enough to absorb them all, crystallizing the flavors and essence of each cuisine. Read entire article.

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“It is a matter of physics, a scientific fact that the human body reacts in very similar ways when anticipating food and sex. Capillaries swell, lips and membranes become engorged, saliva thickens and the pulse rises. It’s no accident that the two pleasures have become… confused.”

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Anthony Bourdain,  No Reservations

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What’s Your Food Porn Preference?

Fat or skinny. Exotic or plain. Enhanced or au naturel.

Food Porn and the x-rated variety make use of the same visual language and techniques, full of provocative camera angles, exaggerated features, and saturated colors. The subject matters differ, but they push our primal buttons in the same way. Read entire article.

Kanye Wurst courtesy of Food’lebrities

Food can be funny.
Cake Wrecks tapped into this big time. Documenting the sad, silly, creepy, and inappropriate from the world of professional baking, the Cake Wrecks blog has more than one million followers on Twitter and was turned into a bestselling book.

Cake Wrecks is not alone out there.
Following are some of my favorite internet sites documenting the entertainment value of food. Read entire article.