Fussy Finicky Compulsive Persnickety

Janice | May 16, 2013 - 11:08 am

image via Kakitee

It’s the dinner guest from hell.

You know the one. He’s not a vegetarian. His diet is not restricted by religion. He doesn’t have food allergies or a medical condition. He’s just plain fussy.

We think of picky eating as a childhood phenomenon, but there are adults among us– otherwise sensible, well-adjusted men and women– who somehow never outgrew their fussiness. They are perversely choosy, banishing from their diets specific foods and entire food groups. Adult picky eaters might have given up the high chair histrionics of the toddler years, but otherwise haven’t ‘grown out of it,’ as everyone predicted.

While a typical omnivore enjoys thousands of flavors and combinations, a picky eater might tolerate a few dozen.

Meals for them can be minefields of phobic flavors and textures with no discernible logic guiding likes and dislikes: raw mushrooms but not cooked; cooked tomatoes but not raw; they gag on all dairy except for sour cream which magically makes everything taste better.

Theories abound.

Picky eaters have always puzzled clinicians. At various times over the years, picky eating has been linked to obsessive-compulsive disorders, a dulled sense of taste, a childhood trauma centered around food, and the heightened perceptions of a supertaster, There is no known diagnostic category; traditional eating disorders are all organized around weight, appearance, and body image. Yet the behavior around a severely limited diet can interfere with social and professional relationships, which is a hallmark of a true psychiatric disorder.

Fussy-Finicky-Compulsive-Persnickety: in the spotlight.

Now the psychiatric community is considering recognizing Selective Eating Disorder as a medical condition that could apply to adults and children. A task force has been convened to study and categorize finicky eating in adults (known as the Food F.A.D. Study). Researchers at Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh have launched the first public registry of picky eaters that has already attracted thousands of respondents .

Join the national registry and participate in a survey of eating preferences and habits at DukeHealth.org.

Picky Eating Adults Support(PEAS) is a large online community of fussy eaters with chapters in the U.S. and the U.K. You’ll find information, support groups, forums, and other resources.

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Life Has Become One Continuous Snack

Janice | May 14, 2013 - 10:26 am

It’s official: we’re a nation of noshers.
We kick off the day with breakfast—no skipping that most important meal of the day—but then we pretty much leave our mouths open and graze straight through to dinner. So says the most recent analysis of government data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES).

We graze.
In the late 1970′s, 40% of Americans said that they didn’t typically eat between-meal snacks. With 3 meals a day for most, the average number of eating occasions was 3.9 per day. Today we’re skipping more meals but snacking so frequently that we have pushed daily eating occasions up to 10. Just 4% of Americans say they don’t regularly snack, with most reporting 3 or more snacks a day.

What lunch break?
Americans are now more likely to skip lunch than breakfast. 85% reported eating breakfast the previous day, while only 80% reported eating lunch.

We like pizza. A lot.
In the late 1970′s, just 6% of kids and teens and 3% of adults reported eating pizza the previous day. Today those numbers have more than tripled for all of us, with 10% of adults and 20% of 2-19 year olds reporting a pizza snack or meal in the last 24 hours.

We eat pitifully little fruit.
That’s been consistent. Since the late 1970′s, fruit consumption has held steady at 0.9 portions per day, and that includes fruit juices.

More of us are eating our vegetables.
Just not so many of them. While 25% of Americans today report eating fruits or vegetables in the previous 24 hours, the average is just a combined 1.9 servings in a day. In the 1970′s only 12% ate their fruits and veggies, but they typically consumed 2.6 portions.

Got milk? Not much.In the 1970′s, 64% of the population (children and adults) had drunk a glass of milk in the previous day. Today the majority of Americans, 54%, don’t regularly drink milk.

You can find the full report at the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. NHANES is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has produced vital and health statistics for the nation for 50 years.

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Ricotta: Never an Expiration Date

Janice | May 13, 2013 - 6:10 pm

There’s ricotta and there’s ricotta.
If that means nothing to you, then you’ve never had ricotta.
The good stuff doesn’t come with an expiration date.

There are cheeses that improve with age. Ricotta is not one of them.
Technically, ricotta isn’t even a cheese. It’s a by-product of the cheese making process. Ricotta is made from whey, the milky water that’s left after the real cheese is pulled out. The whey sits and ferments at room temperature for a day, and fine, fluffy curds of ricotta form when it’s heated. It’s a second heating since the milk was heated once for the original cheese making—hence the name ricotta, which means ‘recooked’ in Italian.

Ricotta’s age should be measured in hours, not days.
The curds are ready to eat as soon as they’re strained from the water, and that first scooping is best of all, when the curds are at their airiest and most quiveringly delicate. After just a few minutes the fragile curds will compress a bit under their own weight forcing out moisture. As the minutes and hours tick away they’ll continue to drain, becoming increasingly drier and firmer, eventually becoming like the dense pebbles you find in the supermarket.

Ricotta’s taste has a similar trajectory.
The freshest ricotta is sweet but with a grassy lilt, lush and powerfully milky, but over time the vividly fresh flavors fade away.
Even at its peak, ricotta charms through subtlety, which is one of its great virtues: it’s a utility player in the kitchen able to play both sweet and savory, both raw and cooked. And it’s a great carrier of flavors, making it ideal as a stuffing for everything from chicken to rum cake.

Don’t mistake mild for bland.
Ricotta will never bowl you over with taste and complexity like the tang of a farmstead cheddar or the pungency of Stilton. But find it made fresh and eat it fast and it will win you over with simplicity and freshness.

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Online Auctions Make Fantasy Dinner Parties a Reality

Janice | May 10, 2013 - 1:21 pm

Pop Culture Last Supper via Adara Tiana

Last Supper with Dead Rock Stars by Misha Tyutunik

Physicists Last Supper by Nick Farrantello

Who’s on your fantasy dinner party guest list?

We’ve all played the parlor game: if you could invite anyone, living or dead, who would have at your dinner table?
As you go around the room and name your names, there are some predictable results. Jesus, the President, Steve Jobs, John Lennon, Einstein, or the Dalai Lama will make someone’s list. Maybe Warren Buffet would show up (who wouldn’t want some investment advice?), Gandhi (more meat for the rest of us), and Martin Luther King Jr. to say grace. So will someone’s sixth grade teacher and a great grandpa who died in a war. The rest of the table would probably be filled out with intellectuals and sex symbols, favorite writers, athletes, and Hollywood stars.

Online celebrity auction sites can pretty much fill your dream table, and the proceeds generally go to charity.
Currently you can arrange to have lunch with Gloria Steinem, cast members of the Big Bang Theory or The Simpsons, or with Francis Ford Coppola at the winery he owns in Napa Valley. You can dine with the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, have cocktails with Quincy Jones, or go to tea with primatologist Jane Goodall.

Most of the sites operate with a standard auction model with the spoils awarded to the highest bidder. Omaze has a more raffle-like, and more democratic, process collecting thousands of small donations, usually under $10, and choosing the winner in a random lottery. The auctions donate from 80-100% of the proceeds to charitable organizations, usually chosen by the celebrities.

The hottest date right now—and it’s not even dinner but just for coffee—is with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. The auction was first posted in April offering a cup of Joe and an hour of Mr. Cook’s time with an estimated value of $50,000. It reached $190,000 in the first day, and has since skyrocketed to $605,000 (placed by an anonymous bidder known only as J********n) with four days to go.

Check out Charity Buzz, EBay Celebrity, Hollywood Charity Auction, Charity Folks, and Omaze where you’ll see ongoing auctions for all kinds of social engagements with sports figures, politicians, artists, rappers, technology wizards, business leaders, and plenty of Hollywood stars. For the right price, or sometimes just a little luck, you can fill the dinner table of your dreams.

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Mobee Turns Smartphone Users Into Mystery Diners

Janice | May 9, 2013 - 4:03 pm

image via OC Review

If there’s one thing that unites us all as a people it’s a collective love of free food.
And of course everybody’s a critic. That’s why the life of an undercover mystery diner sounds so appealing. Mobee is offering it to all of us with a new app that rewards users who will visit retailers and restaurants incognito and provide feedback.

Mobee is looking to turn the secret shopper industry on its head with a social media twist.
Traditionally, secret shoppers are used by companies to keep tabs on the customer experience. Usually an outside consultant maintains a small army of shoppers and diners, some trained critics, some ordinary members of the public, and regularly dispatches them to client locations where they pose as customers. When it’s a restaurant, they’re there to report on everything from hostess greetings to over-salted soup to bathroom cleanliness. The visit may be tightly scripted, and there is usually a long and detailed questionnaire that the shopper completes after the experience. Discreet note-taking may be allowed, but the diner can’t bring the script or other paperwork to the table, and the turn-around time for the post-dining debriefing can be hours or days.

Mobee’s founder Prahar Shah looked at a multi-billion dollar industry that still runs on paper and pencil, and he saw an opportunity.
Research showed that each outlet of a dining chain like Panera or Starbucks can spend $200 a month for surveys from four or five mystery diner visits. Factor in the millions of customers who are already offering free feedback through recommendation sites like Yelp and Urban Spoon. Shah founded Mobee on the idea that a phone-based model enlisting an army of unpaid critics can gather more data for less money, and do so with greater accuracy and faster delivery than the standard industry practice.

Mobee slices up a full-length secret shopper assignment into bite-sized visits it calls missions. Each consists of 5 to 10 questions focusing on a specific aspect of the customer experience, and might request a photo. Since ordinary customers incessantly tap and snap with their phones, it can all performed in the open and transmitted in real time (the target restaurant market is casual and quick-serve— the behavior is basically standard rudeness). Users aren’t reimbursed for purchases but are paid in digital credits of generally $5 or $10 that can go into Amazon, iTunes, or PayPal accounts.

Mobee is live in Boston, where more than 30,000 missions have already been performed, and a national (and later international) roll-out is in the works.

The Mobee app is available for the iPhone, with an Android version coming soon.

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What We Can Learn from the European Horse Meat Scandal

Janice | May 7, 2013 - 1:39 pm

It’s not just horse meat. It’s not just Europe.

Earlier this year, dinner tables across Europe were graced with an uninvited guest.
When it left Romania it was a horse. A Swedish food producer moved it to a facility in France where it came out labeled as cow. In Luxembourg it became ground beef. The horse-cow meat turned up as frozen hamburger patties in England and Ireland; it went into ravioli and tortellini in Italy and Spain; it appeared in Belgian chili con carne, French moussaka, and Swedish shepherd’s pie. Slovakia, Hungary, Portugal, and the Netherlands had horse-cow meat show up in school cafeterias, fast food outlets, and hospital meals. At the same time, South Africa was undergoing its own meat disaster with donkey, goat, and water buffalo showing up in sausages, burger patties, and deli meats; and 20,000 tons of mislabeled meats were removed from China’s markets where rat, fox, and mink meat was spiced up and sold as lamb.

Of course it could happen here.
Some familiar U.S. brands were ensnared in the European scandal like Burger King, Taco Bell, and Birds Eye. There was even a near miss with Ikea’s worldwide shipments of Swedish meatballs. But the real reason we’re ripe for our own food fiasco is that we have our own kinks in the food supply chain.

Meat processing has changed dramatically in recent decades. A hamburger eaten in the 1970′s would have been processed by a small, perhaps local, meat packer and likely contained beef from a single cow. Today’s meat packer has thousands of animals sourced from a vast, international network of suppliers moving through in a single day. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a single hamburger can contain the meat of as many as 400 different cows. Yet oversight is provided by an arcane, archaic, and under-funded food safety system that lacks both traceability and transparency.

You could argue it already is happening.
There have been large-scale, deadly failures in our safety inspections of eggs and beef. We regularly import fraudulently-labeled specialty foods like Kobe beef, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil, and major retailers like Wal-Mart have been found to sell dozens of conventional items labeled as organic. Most egregious and widespread is the mislabeling of fish. The nonprofit conservation group Oceana reports that fraud is so rampant throughout the supply chain that one-third of all fish is misrepresented, and for popular fish varieties like red snapper, salmon, and cod it occurs as often as 75% of the time. Mislabeled fish exploits all of us as consumers, but potential allergens, toxins, and contaminants also pose a serious health threat.

Every year contaminated food sickens 48 million Americans. Although none of the mislabeled horse meat reached our shores, it’s clear that the U.S. food supply has plenty of its own vulnerabilities.

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Not Pushing Caffeine to Kids? Yeah, Sure.

Janice | May 6, 2013 - 3:06 pm

Which of these is being marketed to children?

clockwise from top: Energy Gummi Bears, Nixie Tubes candy powder, Brain Bits watermelon candy, Cracker Jack’d

According to their manufacturers, none of them.

The Food and Drug Administration announced last week that it’s launching an investigation into the safety of caffeine in food products, particularly its effects on children. Surprisingly, the agency doesn’t have any rules for caffeine in food. It classifies caffeine as a GRAS, an acronym for food additives that are Generally Recognized As Safe. Any additive with the GRAS designation—and there are more than 4,500 of them—is exempt from safety testing when a manufacturer adds it to a new product.
Caffeine’s GRAS designation dates back to 1958.

The proliferation of caffeinated foods, not beverages, is something new.
Caffeine has been popping up in the most unlikely of places. You can find it added to breakfast foods like instant oatmeal, frozen waffles, and pancake syrup. It’s being added to snack foods like potato chips, marshmallows, sunflower seeds, beef jerky, Jelly Belly ‘extreme sport’ jelly beans, and most recently a new line of caffeinated Wrigley’s chewing gum.

Caffeine is now consumed at levels that the FDA could have never anticipated when it first classified the additive as a GRAS.
In 1958, there were no energy drinks, sports beverages, or caffeinated ‘smart’ waters. Per capita soda consumption was one-third of today’s level. And now we have caffeine’s appearance in a wide range of new products, including foods that are especially appealing to children and teens.

We keep things loose when it comes to kids and caffeine.
The United States doesn’t have dietary guidelines for caffeine consumption for adults or children. Since we don’t know how much is too much, there’s little effort made to limit it. In theory, caffeine-added products aren’t supposed to be marketed to children, but it’s up to the manufacturers, advertisers, and trade associations to regulate it. Most manufacturers insist that they don’t target kids. Apparently they’re using kid-friendly cartoon mascots and logos to push caffeinated gummy bears and pixy stix to adults.

Where have we heard that one before?

Posted in food safety, food trends, health + diet | Leave a comment

Online Wine Shopping: Let the Algorithm Do the Picking

Janice | May 3, 2013 - 6:10 pm

image by Jomphong via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Would you trust a computer to choose your wine?
There’s a new generation of wine sellers counting on it.

Wine has been a tough sale online.
Wine shopping is daunting even in a traditional, bricks and mortar wine shop, where most customers wander the aisles a while and then end up grabbing an old favorite, an eye-catching label, or whatever’s on sale, with finger’s crossed that it won’t disappoint. It can be even more overwhelming online where the selection is inexhaustible and you don’t have store displays to cue you. Add to that a regulatory maze of interstate shipping laws, and by 2007, online sales were a piddling 3% of retail wine sales.

In the last few years, the internet has blossomed into a virtual vineyard.
Wine has benefited enormously from the rise of social media. There are thousands of online wine groups sharing tasting notes, alerting members to flash sale sites like Lot 18, and holding virtual wine tastings where on the count of three everybody uncorks and sips the same bottle. You can order wine for your Facebook friends through that site’s birthday reminders, and even Amazon, twice burned by failed wine-selling ventures, has jumped back in.

To succeed online, wine sites have to be more than just digital catalogs. Wine is consumed experientially, and in that sense its purchase has more in common with music or movies than with, say, a pair of shoes. That’s why the new generation of wine sellers looked not to Zappo’s but to Netflix for their sales model. And the secret sauce of the wildly successful video service is in the predictive algorithms that fuel their recommendations.

Online shopping has always run on recommendation engines.
The innovation was pioneered by Amazon, where now you’ll find them integrated into every inch of the shopping experience. From the home page through to the last click at checkout, Amazon beseeches you to consider ‘Frequently Bought Together’ items, ‘Customers Who Bought this Item Also Bought,’ and the less persuasive ‘Customers Who Viewed this Item Also Viewed,’ as well as ‘Sponsored Links,’ ‘Product Ads from External Websites,’ and a sidebar of ’More Buying Choices.’ Amazon’s algorithms skew toward building recommendation lists from items ordered by similar customer profiles. All the come-ons feel a bit like a traveling salesman with a foot stuck in your front door telling you about the vacuum cleaner your neighbor just bought.

Wine, like DVDs, requires more finesse.
Using its peer-to-peer comparative algorithms, Amazon derives a reported 10% of its book sales through recommendations on the site, while at Netflix recommendations drive 75% of the video viewing. Netflix accomplishes this through its algorithms, which turn an infinite buffet of data into a highly personalized, user-friendly experience. Instead of comparative recommendations, it builds individual profiles based on each customer’s individual preferences. It’s constantly throwing DVD titles at you, always asking your opinion about what you watch both on the service and elsewhere. Like Netflix, the new wine recommendation engines run on ratings. They build taste a profile based on what you’ve enjoyed in the past, and continually tinker with the profile as you rate your new wine purchases. And unlike Netflix, where the queue can get clogged with the entire Toy Story oeuvre, you don’t have to share this with your kids.

I’ll have what the MacBook Pro is having.
Try one of the new digital sommeliers:

Wine start-up Taste Factor, which compares the complexity of its recommendation engine to NASA, is like a custom wine-of-the-month club. Sign up for the subscription service and you get a starter pack of wine to rate. Your feedback establishes a tasting baseline, which is refined after subsequent monthly shipments, each of which is uniquely chosen for you.

Instead of NASA, Club W feels more like an online dating service. You start with a questionnaire—not about wine but lifestyle questions and details like how you take your coffee. The screen fills with potential matches, and you choose the ones that look good to you.

WineSimple also starts with a quiz to build each individual consumer taste profile. The geo-servicing phone app doesn’t sell wine, but it lets you know when you’re in a shop or restaurant that carries one of your recommended bottles.

Posted in beer + wine + spirits, cyberculture, shopping | Leave a comment

Vine: The New Food Porn

Janice | May 1, 2013 - 5:02 pm

You’re looking at clips from Vine, Twitter’s 6-second looping video app that’s the latest social media phenomenon.

A lot can happen in 6 seconds.
There’s a widely held belief in internet marketing circles that you have less than 10 seconds to make an impression—hook ‘em fast or they’ve already moved on to the next site. Vine gives its creators 6 seconds of sound and video to amuse and entertain, share some knowledge, or tell a simple story. The brevity hobbles some and inspires others; you can end up with a frenetic unwatchable mess or a mini-masterpiece. Worst case, it’s still only 6 seconds.

Porn, lol cats, and food— the usual suspects take up residence.
Vine is a quick and dirty app that makes it incredibly easy to record brief video clips and share them on social networks. Within days of its launch, the porn hordes had jumped right in. Go figure. Pornographic video clips threatened to dominate the early content mix, nearly derailing Vine’s release, as they did with close cousin Chatroulette. Twitter and Vine’s guidelines don’t exclude pornography, but it does violate Apple’s terms of service for the App Store, and when a particularly nasty clip was featured as an ‘Editor’s Pick’ in the Vine app, Apple pulled the product from the App Store’s virtual shelves. Twitter quickly raised the minimum age limit to download the Vine app from 12 to 17; it shot to the top of the free app charts and has has stayed there ever since.

Vine has all the hallmarks of a lasting social media outlet. It’s easy to use and easy to unleash the results on Twitter and Facebook. The early flowering of porn has taken a backseat to the mainstream mainstays of bloopers, sports highlights, celebrity postings, the antics of cats and babies, teenaged girls showing off the contents of their closets, and food. Lots of food. There’s so much food porn on Vine that it’s been disparaged by some as ‘Chefroulette.’ Home cooks are showing off their knife skills, recipe sites are adding how-to segments, and the still-life of a dinner plate has given way to a video of clip of a meal’s progression of courses.

Vine’s video creation options are ON and OFF. You touch the screen to shoot and scroll to play. The app takes the raw footage and ambient sound, stitches together sequential shots, and loops them back on themselves. Its extreme limitations are seen as a challenge to unlock the creative potential of the 6-second snippet, and Vine has given rise to a new art form of imaginative visual arrangements, laugh-out-loud sight gags, and especially jaw-dropping stop-motion food animations that take advantage of Vine’s one and only, but surprising powerful, tool—the on-off switch.

There are lots of ways to explore Vine– even without the app:
Vinepeek is a live stream of un-moderated, newly-posted Vines. You’ve been warned.
All Around the Vines streams live but can be sorted by the hashtag #food.
Vinesmap shows geotagged Vines and plots them on a world map.
Vineroulette loads a full-screen collage of dozens of videos, sortable by subject.
VinesZap loads a preview grid of nine Vines. Click on what looks good.
Vinecats—because sometimes you need a break from all the food Vines.

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Dear Gwyneth.

Janice | April 29, 2013 - 1:07 pm

Dear Gwyneth,
Can I have a word with you, friend to friend?

Please stop writing cookbooks.
I’m sorry, but it had to be said.
And be grateful that it’s coming from me, because there are plenty of harsher critics out there.

The Atlantic Wire dubbed your new one (It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great) ’the Bible of laughable Hollywood neuroticism,‘ and the New York Post likened it to a ‘manifesto to some sort of creepy healthy-girl sorority’ under the headline A Recipe for Ridicule. According to Eater, it’s full of a chatty faux-populism that could only come from a rich person fearlessly boasting about her life of privilege,’ and the U.K. Guardian calls it completely crackpot served up with a hefty side of overprivilege.

Yes, Gwyneth, it’s happening again.
Two years ago your first cookbook inspired snarky critics to hunt down its most unintentionally funny line (sample contender: “I first had a version of this at a Japanese monastery during a silent retreat…”). Maybe it was the way you instructed us to “nourish the inner aspect,” or maybe it was that book’s rundown of kitchen ‘essentials’ that had us scouring specialty stores and digging deep into our wallets, and then wondering what the hell to do with an opened bottle of $40 ginger liqueur, although you did allow that in a pinch we could substitute bacon for duck prosciutto.

I gotta tell you, Gwyneth, sometimes you come off like a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
I suppose I could cut you some slack. You had a posh and fabulous early Hollywood life (is Steven Spielberg really your godfather?), a charmed career (an Academy award in your 20′s!), and some not-too-shabby romances (Ben Affleck and Brad Pitt before the rock star husband). The willowy blond thing doesn’t hurt either. Of course we can’t relate. But the real problem is that you seem incapable of relating to us.

The fact is that really very few of us keep duck eggs in our refrigerators to whip up your omelette recipe, and I for one don’t aspire to a diet based in ’psychospiritual nutrition’ that leaves you with something you scarily describe as “that specific hunger that comes with avoiding carbs.” And do you know how out of touch you sound when you say things like: “I would rather die than let my kid eat Cup‑a-Soup”? But when it comes to statements made out of a blinkered sense of entitlement, there is none more clueless than your USA Today interview: “One of my most negative qualities is this perfectionism that I have, and I think that I unconsciously project that because it comes from self-doubt and insecurity, and that’s the ironic part. I’m so deeply flawed. I’m just a normal mother with the same struggles as any other mother who’s trying to do everything at once and trying to be a wife and maintain a relationship.”

Oh, Gwyneth!

image via SFGate

Posted in diversions, Entertainment, funny | 1 Comment

Oh Cap’n! My Cap’n!

Janice | April 26, 2013 - 12:47 pm

Does Cap’n Crunch have more lives than Tony the Tiger?

Back in 2011, the rumor mill started grinding with an article in AOL’s Daily Finance. A reporter noted that Cap’n Crunch cereal was nowhere to be found on the Quaker website. The article’s speculative title asked the question Is Cap’n Crunch Easing Quietly Into Retirement?
The piece was a rumination on the challenges facing the brand: its shrinking market share, public criticism of food companies that market to children, and White House pressure to make healthier products. It concluded that this is a pretty good time for the Cap’n to maintain a low profile.

The blogosphere then took that thread of speculation and ran with it:
Cap’n Crunch Retires (Seattle Post-Intelligencer); Cap’n Crunch sails into obscurity (Today on MSNBC); Cap’n Crunch Retirement (Yahoo! Buzz).
Fox News, as is its wont, took it a step further, fabricating a political angle: Food Police Kill Cap’n Crunch (Fox Nation), inspiring headlines in conservative blogs like Obama’s Soggies Force Cap’n Crunch Into Early Retirement (AsianConservatives.com), and Cap n’ Crunch: Michelle Obama Forces Captain Crunch’s Retirement?(Conservative BlogsCentral).

This spring Cap’n Crunch is sailing back from the brand equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.
Beginning May 7th he’ll be hosting his very own YouTube talk show set in a giant cereal bowl aboard his old ship, the S.S. Guppy. In the language of the Pepsico press release, the show’s content is described as a mix of ’interesting guests, topical banter, and comedy sketches.’ The Cap’n's faithful companion Sea Dog will serve as his on-set sidekick. The show’s official teaser can be viewed here. New videos will be added to the YouTube channel every other Tuesday through spring and summer.

Count Chocula could not be reached for comment.

Posted in cyberculture, diversions, Entertainment | 1 Comment

We Can Do This. We Can Get Yellow Dye Out of Kraft Mac & Cheese.

Janice | April 25, 2013 - 12:09 pm

Meet Tartrazine and Sunset Yellow.

You can thank them for the foil pouch of day-glo cheese powder that comes in every box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Every box in the U.S., that is. Kraft reformulated the recipe for the European market replacing the artificial dyes with natural, plant-based ingredients like paprika and beta carotene. The dyes are gone because European consumers revolted over potentially harmful side effects and demanded that the company remove them.

Both of these yellow dyes are man-made chemicals derived from petroleum.
The additives have been linked to a host of disturbing side effects like asthma, eczema, and migraines, in addition to hyperactivity and learning impairments in children. The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that both dyes are also contaminated with known carcinogens. And they serve no purpose beyond the aesthetics of bright orange cheese, contributing nothing to the nutritional value or safety of food.

They’re not just in the blue box of Kraft.
It’s estimated that a young child with a taste for fast- and processed foods could be eating as much as a pound of food dye every year. Well beyond the usual suspects like purple Popsicles and rainbow Skittles, you’ll find food dyes in a staggering array of foods like canned fruit, fresh oranges, hot and cold cereals, pizza crusts, chocolate milk, salad dressing, lemonade, ginger ale, cookies and bread, chips and crackers, even matzoh balls. Oy veh.

Where, pray tell, is the FDA?
The Food and Drug Agency calls the shots when it comes to food additives, and it has a long history of calling them wrong. Looking at Tartrazine and Sunset Yellow, the agency acknowledged the sizable body of research linking the colorings to behavioral changes in children, but the advisory panel tasked with their review called the evidence inconclusive and recommended that the agency continue its hands-off approach to the additives. Of course FDA approval is hardly a guarantee of safety. The agency’s site lists 91 previously approved artificial dyes that are now banned. And bear in mind that countries throughout Europe weighed the same ‘inconclusive’ evidence against potential health consequences and have banned most artificial food dyes.

We don’t need to wait for the FDA.
Earlier this year, consumers targeted brominated vegetable oil, an additive that prevents flavorings from separating in Gatorade. After studies linked the FDA-approved ingredient to neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones, a petition requesting its removal circulated on Change.org, collecting more than 200,000 signatures. In January Kraft announced that because of the feedback it was reversing its earlier decision to retain the substance and would be replacing Gatorade’s brominated vegetable oil with a more acceptable emulsifier.

It worked for Gatorade. Now let’s get the yellow dye out of our mac & cheese.
Visit Change.org where you can add your name to the 285,000 that have already signed the petition demanding that Kraft stop using dangerous food dyes in its Macaroni & Cheese. You can also bring the fight to the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Facebook page, where thousands of consumers have already chimed in with their comments.

Posted in community, food policy, food safety | 1 Comment

Inside the Staff Meal

Janice | April 24, 2013 - 2:23 pm

The staff meal is coming out of the kitchen.
We’re curious about the restaurant staff meal, the standard pre-service sustenance that’s commonly referred to as family meal within the industry. It’s a time-honored tradition in restaurants where the staff spends its shift surrounded by food but is too slammed to manage more than a few half-cold, intermittent bites while standing up in the kitchen.

Family meal is a rare occasion when the hierarchy of the kitchen brigade is broken down, and the front and the back of the house mingle—dishwashers sit with beverage directors, hostesses with sous chefs, and line cooks rub elbows with bartenders. The food that’s served is also a break with the restaurant’s traditions and culture.

Chefs use staff meals to experiment with future menu items and as a training ground for young cooks. Pantry and prep cooks might try their hand, and the wait staff might turn it into a potluck one night. It can mean Brazilian home cooking served by the Latino line cooks at a French restaurant or potpies from a pastry chef looking to branch out into savory dishes.

The odds, ends, and nasty bits.
Cost is paramount. Staff meal costs are tax-deductible for the restaurant, but the IRS forbids owners from dinging wages. The well-run restaurant makes use of leftovers, less-than-prime produce, and cuts that can’t find a place on the regular menu. Inspiration is found in the far reaches of the walk-in where wilted kale, lamb necks, and days-old cuttlefish will find their way into casseroles, croquettes, and curries. Meals end up looking like a cross between recessionary home cooking and a reality TV cooking challenge. And as with any home cook responsible for turning out a regular family dinner, there are hits, misses, and nights when you can’t do better than hot dogs on buns.

There are the staff meal legends.
At most restaurants, the kitchen staff is stuck behind the stove and the servers are likely to grab a plate and cop a squat in the alley out back. Then there are the family meals responsible for the low turnover among staff at Chanterelle in New York’s SoHo, where the whole restaurant gathers nightly around a white linen-draped round table in the dining room for rich, French bourgeois feasts. Thomas Keller, the chef-owner of the hallowed French Laundry who began his own career cooking staff meals, puts on a lavish weekly sit-down celebration for his staff; and in the culinary stratosphere of places like Copenhagen’s Noma and Spain’s (now closed) El Bulli, the kitchens are literally filled with dozens of unpaid crew members willing to work merely for the offer of free staff meals.

Eat staff meals and still keep your day job.
Two recent cookbooks, Off the Menu: Staff Meals from America’s Top Restaurants, and Come In, We’re Closed: An Invitation to Staff Meals at the World’s Best Restaurants take you inside the staff meal time of some very good kitchens.
After each night’s dinner rush, D.C.’s District Commons restaurant rings an old farm bell signaling the start of the family meal, offering customers a classic staff meal menu at a bargain price.
The restaurant industry blog StarChefs features occasional profiles of extraordinary and unusual staff meals.

Posted in food business, restaurants | Leave a comment

Kids Drinking Coffee. Why Not?

Janice | April 23, 2013 - 2:38 pm

[image via the New Yorker]

Of course kids are drinking coffee.
What else is left?
Soda is out—high fructose corn syrup, you know. Sports drinks are, as the British press put it, just lolly water. Ditto for juice boxes. Certainly not milk with all that lactose-intolerance going around.
Coffee it is.

And what exactly is so wrong with that?

Coffee doesn’t stunt anyone’s growth. That turned out to be a giant fallacy.
And it has health benefits, reducing the risk for Parkinson’s disease, liver cirrhosis, and gallstones. Not exactly pediatric ailments, but it can’t hurt. More intriguing is growing evidence to support years of anecdotal claims from parents that the caffeine in coffee actually calms down children with ADHD.

Gunning their little engines with caffeine.
Coffee does of course rev kids up, and it can leave them with jittery nerves and insomnia. And children are already getting plenty of caffeine from sources like soda, candy, hot chocolate, ice cream, and even cold medicine.

Tolerances and responses to caffeine differ widely among individuals, but it’s pretty safe to assume that the younger they are, the less coffee they probably should drink. The United States hasn’t developed dietary guidelines for kids and caffeine, but Health Canada recommends no more than 45 mg/day for 4 – 6 year olds; 62.5 mg/day at 7 – 9 years; and 85 mg/day for 10 – 12 year olds— compared with moderate adult intake of around 400 mg. (about 3 coffees’ worth).

The real problem isn’t even the coffee.
It’s the fat and calories of the vanilla syrup and the caramel drizzle, the steamed milk and whipped cream. It’s all the frozen, blended mochafrappacappalattaccinos that masquerade as coffee. There are coffee concoctions that hover in burger-and-fries territory in terms of fat and calories. For a child, that can add up to breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in a single to-go cup. And there aren’t many kids who take it black.

Best is to watch the sugar and keep a tally of caffeine from all sources.
And at four bucks a pop for a fancy latté drink, no one should be in a hurry to cultivate their kid’s coffee habit.

Posted in coffee, health + diet, kids | Leave a comment

Because the Soul Needs Feeding Too

Janice | April 22, 2013 - 11:10 am

Perhaps the World Ends Here

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

by Joy Harjo

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Where’s the Line Between Free Samples and Shoplifting?

Janice | April 19, 2013 - 1:36 pm

image via Colors Magazine

Spear one cheese cube with a toothpick and you’re sampling. Are you pilfering if you snare a dozen? Is it shoplifting if you dump the plateful in a produce bag for later?
How much is too much? Exactly what constitutes a free sample?
These are the questions at the heart of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.

The plaintiff, 68 year-old Erwin Lingitz, went into the Cub Goods supermarket in White Bear Township, Minnesota to pick up a prescription. He helped himself at two un-hosted displays offering free samples of lunch meat, and then packed some up for his wife who was waiting outside in the car. He was arrested by store security as he exited the store.

An attorney for the supermarket chain itemized his haul: ”Plaintiff had approximately 14-16 packets of soy sauce along with one plastic produce bag containing 0.61 pounds for [sic] summer sausage and another plastic produce bag containing 0.85 pounds of beef stick in his pockets,” She also claims that the store’s manager had spotted Mr. Lingitz on previous occasions filling plastic produce bags “with 10-20 cookies from the kids’ cookie club tray, which specifically limits the offer to one free cookie per child.”

The supermarket calls it theft, arguing that “The plaintiff violated societal norms and common customer understanding regarding free sample practices.” In an interview with the Twin Cities’ Pioneer Press, Lingitz’s wife, Frankie defends her husband with the statement: “Something is either free or it isn’t. You can’t arrest somebody for thievery if it is free.”

Mr. Lingitz is hardly standing alone on that slippery slope between sampling and stealing.
There’s the Definitive Guide for Food Grazing (for free) at Costco, and another site that shows you how to save $2,000 a year in grocery bills and grow your net worth by eating free samples. And of course who among us has never popped a grape in their mouth in the produce aisle?

Mr. Lingitz is suing for $375,000 in damages claiming that the arrest was a violation of his civil liberties and that he sustained injuries during it. His case hinges on whether it was a lawful arrest, which will depend on whether or not the judge considers it a crime to take too many free samples. It’s potentially a landmark case for retailers since there is currently no legal definition for free samples.

The store’s defense is that free samples are governed by “a common-sense rule.”
A few try-before-you-buy grapes is on one side of it, while stuffing a T-bone inside your raincoat is clearly on the other side. The question is, where does 1.46 pounds of ‘free’ lunch meat fall on the side of common sense?

Posted in diversions, food business, shopping | Leave a comment

A Little Microwave Magic

Janice | April 17, 2013 - 2:33 pm

image via Cargo Collective

The microwave oven is entirely redundant.
It does nothing more than duplicate cooking processes, and it almost never performs them as well as other appliances.
It’s known as a coffee warmer, a butter melter, a popcorn popper, and a leftover heater-upper. Yet 95% of us have one.
Because when it comes to convenience, it’s tough to top the microwave oven.

The following shortcuts play to the oven’s strengths. They’re are all about convenience. There’s nothing here that can’t be done elsewhere in the kitchen. But all of them rely on the microwave oven for ease, speed, and minimal cleanup afterward.

Make skinny potato chips: Lay thin potato slices in a single layer on a plate. Season (salt, pepper, vinegar- whatever you like). Microwave for about 5 minutes until they reach the desired point of brown and crispy done-ness. You can also revive soggy chips with a few second blast on a paper towel.

Dry fresh herbs or grated citrus peels: Spread herbs or peels on a paper towel. Microwave for 1-2 minutes or until dried, stirring every 30 seconds. Cook another 1-2 minutes for thicker peels and herbs.

Make scratch chocolate pudding: Mix 1/3 c. cornstarch, 1/4 c. cocoa powder, 1/2 c. sugar, pinch of salt, and 2 1/4 c. milk. Cook for 2 minutes and stir. 2 more minutes and stir. 2 more minutes and stir in 1 t. vanilla and 2 T. butter. Let stand for about 5 minutes until it’s pudding-thick.

Get twice as much juice from a lemon: Give it 30 seconds in the microwave and then roll it around a few times on the counter. Double juice.

Roast a whole head of garlic: Put a whole, unpeeled bulb of garlic on a paper towel. Microwave on high for 1 minute, turn it upside down and give it another minutes. The soft, roasted cloves will squeeze right out.

Need some melted chocolate for a recipe? Snip the corner off of a bag of chips. Microwave for 20 seconds and knead the bag to mix. Keep repeating in 20 second increments (you’ll need a potholder as it heats up) until fully melted. Squeeze the chocolate out of the cut corner for a completely bowl-less, spoon-less experience.

Peel tomatoes for sauce: 30 seconds of cooking plus a two minute rest and the skins slip right off.

Cook corn on the cob right in its husk: Put unshucked ears of corn on damp paper towel. You can microwave 4 or so at a time, adding a little under 2 minutes cooking time for each ear. Let the corn stand for 5 minutes before serving. The husks and silk will slip off easily.

Make a little cake in a mug: Coat the mug with nonstick spray. Add to the mug 4 T. flour, 9 T. hot chocolate mix, and a pinch of salt. Give a stir and add an egg, 3 T. water, and 3 T. oil. Mix it up well and microwave for 3 minutes. It will rise to alarming heights and then settle back into the mug. It’s not the best chocolate cake you ever tasted, but not-the-best is better than no chocolate cake.

Steam an artichoke: Place a rinsed and trimmed artichoke in a dish deep enough to hold it, cover it with a damp paper towel and top with a sheet of waxed paper. Cook on high for 7 minutes.

Use the microwave to clean your microwave: Boil a bowl of water with a few added splashes of vinegar for five minutes, then wipe. The acidic steam removes odors and loosens any stuck-on bits.

Posted in appliances + gadgets, cooking | Leave a comment

Fun Facts About Guns in Bars and Restaurants

Janice | April 16, 2013 - 2:27 pm

porcelain pistol by Yvonne Lee Schultz

There’s a lot of talk about gun control at the state and federal level. Let’s talk about guns on a personal level that affects all of us: in bars and restaurants.

Fun Fact: Red state or blue—it makes no difference. Nearly every state throws its bar and restaurant doors open to gun-toting customers.

There’ve been some changes in the wake of December’s tragic shootings in Newtown; just not the kind you might expect. With bills pending in a number of state legislatures, we’ll soon see a majority of states explicitly allow residents to bring concealed and open-carry guns into bars and restaurants, while another 20 states continue to allow them by default.

Fun Fact: Tennessee State Representative Curry Todd served time this year for drunk driving and possession of a handgun while under the influence of alcohol. He had previously worked tirelessly as the sponsor of the nation’s first guns-in-bars law, which Tennessee passed in 2009.

These laws are the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, and represent progress made by the gun lobby as it seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life.

Mixing guns and alcohol: this is truly the logic of the madhouse.
A very large body of research tells us that people who abuse alcohol are far more inclined to engage in risky behaviors, and gun owners are more likely to fall into that group:

Fun Fact: Compared to people who don’t keep guns in the home, gun owners are twice as likely to down five or more drinks in a single sitting; they’re nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to get behind the wheel of a car when drinking; and they consume 60 or more drinks per month at more than double the rate of non-owners.

Looking for a 3-star gun-free bistro for Saturday night?
Restaurants are free to post signs banning weapons, and recommendation sites like Yelp now include ratings for gun-free dining. Of course concealed weapons make compliance kind of iffy. Unarmed Tennessee residents rely on the listings at not-for-profit Gun Free Dining Tennessee (their motto: Eat in peace) while the NRA crowd visits GunBurger.com (protecting the Second Amendment one bite at a time).

Fun Fact: The Cajun Experience Restaurant in Leesburg, Virginia offers a 10% discount to diners who come packing heat on ‘Open Carry Wednesdays.’

For all the fun facts, there’s nothing trivial about the dangerous mix of alcohol and firearms.
Americans own more than 300 million non-military weapons. There are more than 40,000 gun-related deaths every year, and one in three involves alcohol.

Are there guns in your local restaurants? The NRA website has an interactive, state-by-state map of current firearm laws.

Posted in beer + wine + spirits, community, food policy | Leave a comment

Food Activists and Tea Partiers Team Up to Fight GMOs

Janice | April 11, 2013 - 11:49 am

image via Whale.to

It’s said that politics make strange bedfellows.
None stranger than the union of Food Democracy Now and the Tea Party Patriots.
The unlikely allies are united in their opposition to a small bit of language that was tucked into the emergency spending bill which Congress passed and President Obama signed that keeps the federal government operating through the end of the fiscal year.

The controversial rider, the so-called ‘Monsanto Protection Act,’ was quietly and anonymously inserted into the agricultural appropriations portion of the 587 page budget document as it wound its way through Congress. The provision allows biotech companies like Monsanto to ignore pending safety reviews and even federal court rulings on the dangers of their genetically modified seeds. Plants can stay planted and seeds can continue to be sown and sold, and the companies can’t be sued over any damages that result when the crops are consumed. Unless there’s a veto or a court rules it to be an unconstitutional usurpation of judicial review, the provision will last until the spending bill expires at the end of September.

This ugly little bit of legislation was eventually proven to be the work of Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo), who represents Monsanto’s home state, is a frequent recipient of Monsanto campaign donations, and is a lawmaker with a long record of using legislative tricks to benefit special interests. It somehow appeared in the Senate version of the budget without committee review or debate, and many in Congress claim to have been unaware of its inclusion. It slipped in under the nose of Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md), who distanced herself with the statement “As Chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Mikulski’s first responsibility was to prevent a government shutdown.”

A common enemy. Sort of.
The Tea Party is protesting the Monsanto Protection Act because it’s rife with abuses of power, special interest loopholes, collusion, and corruption. Tea Partiers aren’t all that worried about the environmental impact and possible health risks of genetically engineered and modified organisms, and in fact their official position is that “It is not the purview of Tea Party Patriots to comment on the merits of GMOs.” But we need to worry about all of it.

The upshot of the legislation is that we’re going to be eating whatever is already out there. And the GMOs and seeds that are already in the ground have this year’s growing season and harvest to spread their funky coding in seeds, pods, spores, and pollen that blow across the land and flow into our water. We have no assurance of consumer safety— there are no independent, long-term studies investigating how this new genetic experiment affects our health, environment, and future food security—and no legal protections or recourse.

Food for thought:
After a recent earthquake in Haiti, Monsanto made a donation of 475,000 tons of genetically engineered and treated seeds to the devastated farmers of the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. They chose to burn them rather than plant them.

Join environmentalists, food activists, and even Tea Partiers in the fight to overturn the Monsanto Protection Act.
Add your name to the petition at Food Democracy Now where they are on their way to a million letters of support.

Posted in food policy, food safety, sustainability | Leave a comment

Restaurants Gear Up for the No-Show Season

Janice | April 9, 2013 - 12:07 pm

Dear Harvard grads who cancel your large party CONFIRMED reservations at the last minute ‘something just came up’, have fun ruling the world.

–tweet sent last May from the Twitter account of Cambridge, MA restaurant Rendezvous (@RendezvousCS)

It’s almost May, the month that brings warm weather, spring blooms, Mothers Day, and restaurant no-shows.
Fickle diners are a restaurateur’s worst nightmare at any time of the year, but the problem peaks in May with college graduation dinners.

Restaurants in cities with large student populations are thrilled at graduation time when families and friends descend on local venues for commencement celebrations. In cities like Boston and Philadelphia, the ceremonies at nearby colleges and universities can give restaurants their biggest nights of the whole year. The problem is, as J. Erin Reilley, general manager of Boston’s Bondir puts it: “Graduates and their families are notorious for flakiness regarding celebratory dinner reservations.”

There’s a penchant for multiple reservations. It can happen innocently when different family members don’t communicate about different bookings and they only learn of overlaps at the last minute. More often it’s intentional with someone trying to hedge their bets with the family’s taste buds. According to Bill Curry of Philadephia’s Cafe Nola: “[Students] will call five or six places and make reservations. Then when their parents get to town, they decide where they’ll go.”

The impact of even a single empty table can be significant in an industry where average profit margins run as low as 3% to 5%. Restaurateurs know that things can happen: a flight is delayed, someone gets sick, the babysitter cancels. But when research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business tells of an average no-show rate of 20% for restaurants in large cities, they also know that the real problem is rudeness.

And no one is immune. On a recent evening, two groups of diners didn’t claim their reservations at Noma, the celebrated Copenhagen restaurant considered by many as the best in the world. With just 12 tables and a tab that hovers around $500 per person it took a real bite out of the night’s business. The next morning, chef and co-owner René Redzepi tweeted: ‘And now a message from the Noma staff: to the people of two different no-show tables last night,’ accompanied by a picture of staff members showing their middle fingers. It was quickly deleted by cooler heads, but of course the retweets carried the message for days.

After a similarly rough night, another fed up restaurateur, this one from Los Angeles’ Red Medicine, turned to Twitter to publicly call out the customers who failed to show up for their booked tables:

Restaurants are experimenting with cancellation fees, reservation deposits, mandatory telephone confirmations, and the Twitter ‘name and shame.’ Of course the only real solution is for diners to realize that a little courtesy goes a long way.

Posted in cyberculture, food business, restaurants | 3 Comments

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