No conflict of interest here

No sirree. [Link]

An alarming report from the California Dietetic Association describes a kind of corporatist apocalyptic nightmare where junk-food companies pony up fat sponsorships in order to pervert the agenda and distort the science. Nutritionists, like other medical professionals, have to attend educational meetings in order to keep up their credentials.

Their professional bodies have seemingly been totally co-opted through corporate sponsorships, and nutritionists who try to document this are thwarted by "no photography" policies. But even without pictures, it's obvious that a panel on corn sweeteners that's paid for by the corn growers and only sports employees of high-fructose corn syrup is not going to produce a rounded picture of the science of obesity and HFCS.

The situation for nutritionists is a microcosm for the whole health industry. As Ben Goldacre details in his essential book Bad Pharma, doctors' continuing education is almost entirely funded by pharmaceutical companies that present multi-hour adverts for their products -- including dodgy studies that they funded -- in place of genuine, impartial scientific training.

Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, wrote about nutritionists and corporate sponsorships in her 2007 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. "I worry a lot about food industry co-optation of my profession," she wrote to me in an email. "Food companies are smart. They know that if they can make friends and help inform dietitians and nutritionists that the people they are supporting or helping will be reluctant to suggest eating less of their products."

Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and member of AND, recalls his shock the first time he attended the organization's national conference, in 2008. "I could get continuing education credits for literally sitting in a room and listening to Frito-Lay tell me that Sun Chips are a good way to meet my fiber needs," he says. "I thought, 'No wonder Americans are overweight and diabetic. The gatekeepers for our information about food are getting their information from junk-food companies.'"

I Went to the Nutritionists' Annual Confab. It Was Catered by McDonald's. [Kiera Butler/Mother Jones]

Making food safer with viruses

Fighting fire with fire. [Link]

Over the years, Satzow has adopted a variety of antimicrobial products and processes to try and close that window. In 2011, he added a new weapon to his bacteria-fighting arsenal, a spray that contains billions of virus particles called bacteriophages—“phages” for short—which target and destroy bacteria, but not human or animal cells. “We try to be on the cutting edge of everything,” Satzow says. So now each package of chorizo or smoky maple links that rolls down the smokehouse’s spotless conveyor belt gets a squirt of a bacteriophage product called Listex before being sealed.

Inside that liquid are billions of phages that bind to bacteria and inject their genetic material. These molecular instructions direct the cells to make more phages that produce an enzyme that “breaks open the cell wall from the inside out,” says Olivia McAuliffe, a senior researcher at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Ireland. The bacterium bursts and dies, and the phages escape and infect other bacteria.

Doctors began using phages to treat bacterial infections nearly a century ago, but the idea that phages could protect against food-borne pathogens came about in the past decade. “The food industry isn’t known for its quick adaptation for new innovations,” says Dirk DeMeester, director of business development for Micreos Food Safety, the Dutch company that developed Listex. Yet the idea seems to be slowly gaining traction. DeMeester declined to provide sales figures, but he hinted that business is booming. “Our growth is exponential,” he says. “People are starting to understand that it’s more than just a good idea. It’s going to be an industry standard.”

World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air

This could be very big if the need for fertilizer is drastically reduced. [Link]

Speaking about the technology, which is known as 'N-Fix', Professor Cocking said: "Helping plants to naturally obtain the nitrogen they need is a key aspect of World Food Security. The world needs to unhook itself from its ever increasing reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers produced from fossil fuels with its high economic costs, its pollution of the environment and its high energy costs."

N-Fix is neither genetic modification nor bio-engineering. It is a naturally occurring nitrogen fixing bacteria which takes up and uses nitrogen from the air. Applied to the cells of plants (intra-cellular) via the seed, it provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix nitrogen. Plant seeds are coated with these bacteria in order to create a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship and naturally produce nitrogen.

N-Fix is a natural nitrogen seed coating that provides a sustainable solution to fertiliser overuse and Nitrogen pollution. It is environmentally friendly and can be applied to all crops. Over the last 10 years, The University of Nottingham has conducted a series of extensive research programmes which have established proof of principal of the technology in the laboratory, growth rooms and glasshouses.

The University of Nottingham's Plant and Crop Sciences Division is internationally acclaimed as a centre for fundamental and applied research, underpinning its understanding of agriculture, food production and quality, and the natural environment. It also has one of the largest communities of plant scientists in the UK.

Dr Susan Huxtable, Director of Intellectual Property Commercialisation at The University of Nottingham, believes that the N-Fix technology has significant implications for agriculture, she said: "There is a substantial global market for the N-Fix technology, as it can be applied globally to all crops. N-Fix has the power to transform agriculture, while at the same time offering a significant cost benefit to the grower through the savings that they will make in the reduced costs of fertilisers. It is a great example of how University research can have a world-changing impact."

The N-Fix technology has been licensed by The University of Nottingham to Azotic Technologies Ltd to develop and commercialise N-Fix globally on its behalf for all crop species.

Peter Blezard, CEO of Azotic Technologies added: "Agriculture has to change and N-Fix can make a real and positive contribution to that change. It has enormous potential to help feed more people in many of the poorer parts of the world, while at the same time, dramatically reducing the amount of synthetic nitrogen produced in the world."

The proof of concept has already been demonstrated. The uptake and fixation of nitrogen in a range of crop species has been proven to work in the laboratory and Azotic is now working on field trials in order to produce robust efficacy data. This will be followed by seeking regulatory approval for N-Fix initially in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada and Brazil, with more countries to follow.

Why we only buy five varieties of apples

All the apples we eat are grafts from a specific tree, not from seed.  [Link]

The fine points of apple sex were lost on most US colonists, who planted millions of apple seeds as they settled farms and traveled west. Leading the way was John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, who single-handedly planted hundreds of thousands of seeds in the many frontier nurseries he started in anticipation of the approaching settlers, who were required to plant 50 apple or pear trees as part of their land grants. Even if they had understood grafting, the settlers probably wouldn't have cared: Although some of the frontier apples were grown for fresh eating, more fed the hogs or the fermentation barrel, neither of which was too choosy.

Every now and then, however, one of those seedling trees produced something special. As the art of grafting spread, those special trees were cloned and named, often for the discoverer. By the 1800s, America possessed more varieties of apples than any other country in the world, each adapted to the local climate and needs. Some came ripe in July, some in November. Some could last six months in the root cellar. Some were best for baking or sauce, and many were too tannic to eat fresh but made exceptional hard cider, the default buzz of agrarian America.

Bunk called this period the Great American Agricultural Revolution. "When this all happened, there was no USDA, no land grant colleges, no pomological societies," he says. "This was just grassroots. Farmers being breeders." As farms industrialized, though, orchards got bigger and bigger. State agricultural extension services encouraged orchardists to focus on the handful of varieties that produced big crops of shiny red fruit that could withstand extensive shipping, often at the expense of flavor. Today, thousands of unique apples have been lost, while a mere handful dominate the market.

When Bunk lays out his dazzling apple displays, it's a reminder that our sense of the apple has increasingly narrowed, that we are asking less and less from this most versatile of fruits—and that we are running out of time to change course. Exhibit A: The Harrison apple, the pride of Newark, New Jersey, renowned in the early 1800s for making a golden, champagne-like cider that just might have been the finest in the world. But the Harrison, like most of the high-tannin varieties that make good hard cider, disappeared after Prohibition. (The recent hard-cider revival has been making do largely with apples designed for fresh eating, which make boring cider.) But in 1976 one of Bunk's fellow apple detectives found a single old Harrison tree on the grounds of a defunct cider mill in Livingston, New Jersey, grafted it, and now a new generation of Harrison trees is just beginning to bear fruit. It's as if a storied wine grape called pinot noir had just been rediscovered.

The Kobe Beef Lie

More like faux-be beef. [Link]

Think you’ve tasted the famous Japanese Kobe beef?

Think again.

Of course, there are a small number of you out there who have tried it – I did, in Tokyo, and it is delicious. If you ever go to Japan I heartily recommend you splurge, because while it is expensive, it is unique, and you cannot get it in the United States. Not as steaks, not as burgers, certainly not as the ubiquitous “Kobe sliders” at your trendy neighborhood “bistro.”

That’s right. You heard me. I did not misspeak. I am not confused like most of the American food media.

I will state this as clearly as possible:

You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature “Kobe beef” on their menus you believed, you were duped. I’m really sorry to have to be the one telling you this, but no matter how much you would like to believe you have tasted it, if it wasn’t in Asia you almost certainly have never had Japan’s famous Kobe beef.

How can the Onion compete with real life?

The Onion has to step up it's game to compete with stories like this. [Link]

Ben & Jerry's, the iconic ice cream brand famous for flavors borrowed from a broad swath of the culinary spectrum, has apologized for including fortune cookies in its "Taste the Lin-Sanity" frozen yogurt sold at a Harvard Square location in Boston.

The Vermont-founded company has replaced the fortune cookies in its honey-swirl, Jeremy Lin-inspired variety with waffle cones.

"We offer a heartfelt apology if anyone was offended by our handmade Lin-Sanity flavor," Ben & Jerry's said in a statement.

Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution

The man who saved tens of millions from starving. [Link]

The need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain, and in his later years, Borlaug turned his efforts to ensuring the success of this century’s equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or “genetic modification” (GM), to agriculture. As Borlaug and other plant scientists realized, the use of the term “genetic modification” to apply only to the newest genetic techniques is an unfortunate misnomer because plant scientists had been using crude and laborious techniques to obtain new genetic variants of wheat, corn, and innumerable other crops for decades, if not centuries. Products now in development with gene-splicing techniques offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines.

However, small numbers of dedicated extremists in the environmental movement have been doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks, and their allies in national and United Nations-based regulatory agencies are more than eager to help. Activists have trotted out the same kinds of rumors to frighten rural illiterates that confronted Borlaug a half-century earlier—that gene-spliced plants cause impotence or sterility, or that they harm farm animals, for example. As Borlaug observed about opposition to modernizing agricultural practices in India in 1966, “The situation was tailor-made for demagogues, fear-mongers, second-guessers and hate groups. We heard from them all.” In the twenty-first century, they continue to spew their lethal venom.

Occasionally, spurious reports about modern genetic engineering manage to enter even the peer-reviewed literature; a recent example is an absurd, nearly psychotic rant about the supposed negative impacts of gene-spliced soybeans in Argentina. As my colleagues Kent Bradford and Bruce Chassy wrote about that article, “The text is largely a rambling discourse of unfounded and subjective opinion. It contains inadequate and erroneous documentation. Many of the claims made are either not supported by references, or are based on non-peer reviewed references, including press articles.”

Borlaug was concerned that these kinds of attacks were examples of history repeating itself: 

At the time [of the Green Revolution], Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, “Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Hill was right. His prediction anticipated the gene-splicing era that would arrive decades later. . . . The naysayers and bureaucrats have now come into their own. If our new varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available” [emphasis in original].

Borlaug observed that the enemies of innovation might create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.” After slowing the progress of gene-splicing technology by advocating excessive regulation and after filing lawsuits to prevent the testing and commercialization of gene-spliced plants and even vandalizing field trials, activists have had the audacity to accuse the scientists and agribusiness companies of having overpromised technological advances.

This reminds me of a relevant Heinlein quote:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck.".”

- Robert A. Heinlein

On the impracticality of a cheeseburger

Mmm. [Link]

I realized that my prior plan hadn’t been ambitious enough—that wasn’t really from scratch. In fact, to make the buns, I’d need to grind my own wheat, collect my own eggs, and make my own butter. And I’d really need to raise the cow myself (or sheep, and make lamb burgers), mine or extract from seawater my own salt, grow my own mustard plant, etc. This past summer, revisiting the idea, I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat, raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for its rennet to make the cheese, and personally slaughter and process the cow or sheep. At this point I was thinking that this might all add up to an interesting book, and started to consider seriously the undertaking.

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.

Honey Laundering

Ultra filtration of honey to remove pollen makes tracking the origin of honey impossible. [Link]

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.

The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey."

The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies.

The food safety divisions of the  World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

How is it done?

Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey - some containing illegal antibiotics - on the U.S. market for years.

Food Safety News decided to test honey sold in various outlets after its earlier investigation found U.S. groceries flooded with Indian honey banned in Europe as unsafe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and a total lack of pollen which prevented tracking its origin.

Food Safety News purchased more than 60 jars, jugs and plastic bears of honey in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

The contents were analyzed for pollen by Vaughn Bryant, a professor at Texas A&M University and one of the nation's premier melissopalynologists, or investigators of pollen in honey. 

Bryant, who is director of the Palynology Research Laboratory, found that among the containers of honey provided by Food Safety News: 

• 76 percent of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed, These were stores like TOP Food, Safeway, Giant Eagle, QFC, Kroger, Metro Market, Harris Teeter, A&P, Stop & Shop and King Soopers.

• 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS Pharmacy had no pollen.

• 77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, Target and H-E-B had the pollen filtered out. 

• 100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald's and KFC had the pollen removed.

• Bryant found that every one of the samples Food Safety News bought at farmers markets, co-ops and "natural" stores like PCC and Trader Joe's had the full, anticipated, amount of pollen. 

And if you have to buy at major grocery chains, the analysis found that your odds are somewhat better of getting honey that wasn't ultra-filtered if you buy brands labeled as organic. Out of seven samples tested, five (71 percent) were heavy with pollen. All of the organic honey was produced in Brazil, according to the labels.

The National Honey Board, a federal research and promotion organization under USDA oversight, says the bulk of foreign honey (at least 60 percent or more) is sold to the food industry for use in baked goods, beverages, sauces and processed foods.  Food Safety News did not examine these products for this story.

Some U.S. honey packers didn't want to talk about how they process their merchandise.

Updates to Military Rations

Caffeinated jerky. SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM! [Link]

[A]n Army lab here is testing a beef jerky stick that looks and tastes just like your average Slim Jim but contains an equivalent of a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine to give even the sleepiest soldier that up-and-at-’em boost.

After a decade of war, military food scientists have been hard at work at a little-known research facility outside Boston transforming the field ration — known as the Meal, Ready to Eat, and perhaps the most complained about food in the world — into something not just good-tasting but full of energy-enhancing ingredients.

“There is a lot of science that goes into this,” said David Accetta, a spokesman for the Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center, where every item put into an MRE is tested and tasted. “And that’s what a lot of people don’t realize. It’s not just a bunch of cooks in the kitchen making up recipes.”

In addition to caffeine, military technologists are lacing food with supplements such as omega 3s and curcumin, which act as anti-inflammatories. Maltodextrin, a complex carbohydrate that gives service members a little turbo charge, is injected into an amped-up applesauce called Zapplesauce.

And that energizing goo gobbled by marathoners? The Army is developing its very own.

Complaining about the MRE has been a sport within the ranks for years. They’ve been called every derogatory name possible: Meals Rejected by Everyone. Meals Refused by the Enemy. Materials Resembling Edibles. Meals Refusing to Exit.

But in its latest permutations, officials here say, the MRE has gone gourmet — or as gourmet as can be for food that has a shelf life of three years at 80 degrees and can withstand an airdrop from thousands of feet.

The no-name casserole, mystery meat and mealy tuna have been replaced by dishes endorsed by the Natick center’s “sensory evaluators.” Recent chow additions include chicken and pesto pasta, feta cheese and tomato. Dining al fresco in their trenches, soldiers now can choose from ratatouille, garlic mashed potatoes, salsa verde and a strawberry-banana dairy shake.

If you have the time to heat water, there’s instant Irish-cream coffee. If not, caffeinated beef jerky, the military’s variation on the commercially available Perky Jerky, should soon be turning up in MREs.

The technologists’ efforts may be paying off. In reviewing one of the newer entrees, a food writer for the Boston Globe wrote, “The pasta is tender but not falling apart, the sauce dense and sweet, similar to many commercial sauces.”

Is a burrito a sandwich?

Not as simple a question as it seems. [Link]

Is a burrito a sandwich? In 2006, Pennsylvania Judge Jeffrey A. Locke was tasked with establishing legal precedent on the question. The dispute: A local Panera Bread franchise had sued to block a Qdoba Mexican Grill from opening in its shopping complex, citing its contract to be the sole sandwich shop on the block. Qdoba makes the bulk of its income selling burritos. In Panera's view, that put Qdoba in the sandwich business.

Locke decided the issue [PDF] using a dictionary and what he called "common sense." He cited Webster's definition of "sandwich"—"two thin pieces of bread, usually buttered, with a thin layer (as of meat, cheese, or savory mixture) spread between them"—then provided his own understanding of a burrito, a food item "typically made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans." Victory: Qdoba.

Yet Locke's determination raises more questions than it answers. Placing the disconcerting condiment issue aside (usually buttered?), Locke pitted two slices of bread against one tortilla. How, then, would one legally classify an open-faced construction built atop a single piece of bread? How about a quesadilla that employs two tortillas, sandwiched together? Panera Bread declined to appeal over these outstanding questions, and the legal definition remains troublingly vague.

Here at sandwich week, we've spent the last five days celebrating the staple of the American lunch hour. But what are we really celebrating when we celebrate the sandwich? Is it filling spread between two slices of bread, as Locke claims? "Sandwich," after all, is a verb as well as a noun. Must the filling be sandwiched between bread? Is an Oreo a sandwich? A quesadilla? Is a KFC Double Down a sandwich?

Can a food become a sandwich simply by calling itself a sandwich? Does an open-faced sandwich constitute a sandwich, despite the lack of sandwiching employed in its construction? If so, is bruschetta a sandwich? Buttered toast? Pizza?

What if you fold the pizza in half? Must the unifying exterior item be split in two in order to constitute a sandwich? Is a hot dog a sandwich? A submarine roll split in the middle, but with a hinge still hanging on? Is an omelete a sandwich?

A note on methodology: Is it necessary to consume the sandwich with one's own two hands? If one were to douse a sandwich in gravy, would it neutralize the sandwich, converting it into nothing more than a bread-based entree? 

If we'll accept a hinge in a sandwich, what about a filling that's encased on two sides? On all sides? Is a kolache a sandwich? A pasty? A corn dog? A calzone? An egg roll? A dumpling? A pop tart? Is a wrap a sandwich?

Is a burrito a sandwich?

The Waffle House Index

If the Waffle House is closed things are really bad. [Link]

When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the "Waffle House Index."

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

"If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?" FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. "That's really bad. That's where you go to work."

Waffle House Inc. has 1,600 restaurants stretching from the mid-Atlantic to Florida and across the Gulf Coast, leaving it particularly vulnerable to hurricanes. Other businesses, of course, strive to reopen as quickly as possible after disasters. But the Waffle House, which spends almost nothing on advertising, has built a marketing strategy around the goodwill gained from being open when customers are most desperate.

During Hurricane Irene, Waffle House lost power to 22 restaurants in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. By Wednesday evening, all but one in hard-hit coastal Virginia were back in business.

Hurricane Irene knocked out power in Weldon, N.C., on Saturday evening, but as the sun rose on this tobacco-farming town at 6:30 the next morning, the local Waffle House, still without electricity, was cooking up scrambled eggs and sausage biscuits.

"I hadn't had a hot meal in two days, and I knew they'd be open," said Nicole Gainey, a 22-year-old secretary for a truck-repair company who drove over for breakfast.

Waffle House, a privately held company based in suburban Atlanta, may be best known as a roadside stop for retirees driving south or the place where musician Kid Rock got into a brawl after a 2007 concert.

Its yellow-and-black sign hasn't changed in 40 years, and its laminated menu with color photos is an intentional throwback to the heyday of the highway diner. Comedian Jim Gaffigan jokes the Waffle House "makes the IHOP seem international."

The company fully embraced its post-disaster business strategy after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Seven of its restaurants were destroyed and 100 more shut down, but those that reopened quickly were swamped with customers.

The company decided to beef up its crisis-management processes. Senior executives developed a manual for opening after a disaster, bulked up on portable generators, bought a mobile command center and gave employees key fobs with emergency contacts.

In a recent academic paper, Panos Kouvelis, a business-school professor at Washington University in St. Louis, pegged Waffle House as one of the top four companies for disaster response, with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Home Depot Inc. and Lowe's Cos.

Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

They don't know any better. [Link]

While lots of people have noted the general terribleness of restaurant sites, I haven't ever seen an explanation for why this industry's online presence is so singularly bruising. The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is getting worse in the age of the mobile Web—Flash doesn't work on Apple's devices, and while some of these sites do load on non-Apple smartphones, they take forever to do so, and their finicky navigation makes them impossible to use.

Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad—that they can't afford to pay for good designers, that they don't understand what people want from a site, and that they don't really care what's on their site. But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online."

Can I have the Soylent Green instead?

At least Soylent Green is not made of poop. Artificial meat from human feces. [Link]

The meatpacking industry causes 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the release of methane from animals. The livestock industry also consumes huge amounts of feed and water in relation to the amount of meat that it yields, and many find the industry to be inhumane and cruel to animals. These factors alone are reason enough for vegetarians to replace their meat intake with vegetable proteins and legumes. But Ikeda, a scientist at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama, sought to further the field of alternative proteins by recycling a form of protein-rich waste : sewage mud.
“Sewage mud” is exactly what you think it is – poop. Ikeda’s process begins by extracting protein and lipids from the “mud.” The lipids are then combined with a reaction enhancer, then whipped into “meat” in an exploder. Ikeda then makes the poop more savory, by adding soya and steak sauce.
Currently, the price of the poop burgers are 10-20 times that of regular meat, due to the cost of research, but he feels they will even out in a few years. He admits that “some people” may have a psychological aversion to eating artificial meat made of their own poop at first, but thinks many would be open to personally completing the food chain. He also notes that the burgers are extremely low in fat.
The artificial meat is low in fat and reduces waste and carbon emissions, however it’s hard to believe that any number of benefits could persuade consumers to take a bite out of a poop sandwich.

McSpicy Paneer

Big in Indian McDonald's. [Link]

Every April McDonald's India executives hold an offsite meeting to chart the brand's future growth plans and consider modifications to its menu. At the 2009 meeting, the team felt that while McDonald'sIndia had an excellent array of vegetarian products, there was no 'premium' - priced above Rs 50 - offering on this platter. It decided there should be one. Abhijit Upadhye, menu management and supply chain head, was given the responsibility of creating it.

That was the starting point of a two-year-long saga that culminated in the launch of 'McSpicy Paneer' in end-March this year, which has proved so popular that most McDonald's Indian outlets keep running out of stock every day.

India is the fast food chain's global vegetarian hub. It is also the only country where McDonald's does not serve its iconic Big Mac, since the burger patty contains beef. Until recently it was also the only country where McDonald's served vegetarian burgers, though lately, the United Arab Emirates has been picking up McDonald's vegetarian products too, primarily to cater to the expatriate Indian population.


Upadhye, who earlier played a key role in adapting McDonald's French fries for the Indian market and launched the breakfast menu in India, began from scratch. Early on, he and his team decided - on the basis of focus group studies - that the premium burger would be paneer based. The problem? No one had ever made a paneer burger before.

McDonald's had introduced paneer in its menu earlier - it used to have McCurry Pan, which comprised crumbled paneer nuggets - but the paneer burger was a different ball game. Consumer feedback showed they wanted a large slice of paneer filling - and easy as it sounds, that presented a host of problems.

As Sudha Shankarnaryanan, General Manager, Product Development and Quality Assurance, points out, there is very little written material on paneer. "Even Indian cookbooks have barely a page on paneer processing," she says. In a company like McDonald's which is devoted to processes, it meant Shankarnaryanan would have to delineate and standardise the process herself. The first task she embarked upon, along with McDonald's India's largest food processor Vista, was to figure out a way to massproduce a spicy paneer 'fillet', that would comprise the filling of the paneer burger
.

Vat Grown Meat, It's What's For Dinner

Laboratory moo. [Link]

In this week's New Yorker, Michael Specter takes a great look at the world of in-vitro meat—grown in a lab, outside an animal body. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will you eat it?

One of the pioneering figures in this field, Willem van Eelen, dreamed up many of the techniques used today, which rely on cell cultures to foster growth. Many are excited about the prospect of lab-grown meat for various reasons: It could be more efficient than raising and slaughtering animals. It could be healthier than the sickly animals used whose bodies are chock full of pathogens and anti-biotics. It could finally make PETA STFU.

But how is it done? Here's how one lab in Eindhoven accomplishes the task:

The initial cells are typically taken from a mouse. (The Dutch have also focused on pork stem cells, because pigs are readily available to them, often reclaimed from eggs discarded at slaughterhouses or taken from biopsies.) Researchers then submerge those cells in amino acids, sugars, and minerals. Generally, that mixture consists of fetal serum taken from calves...After the cells age, van der Schaft and her colleagues place them on biodegradable scaffolds, which help them grow together into muscle tissue. That tissue can then be fused and formed into meat that can be processed as if it were ground beef or pork.

Triple Double Oreo

What seems obviously like an Onion piece is real. [Link]

Nabisco is set to unleash a brand new kind of Oreo this summer, the "Triple Double Oreo."

The Oreo contains three layers of cookie sandwiching one layer of vanilla cream and one layer of chocolate cream.

Nabisco confirmed the reality of this transformative event in American cuisine to the Today show. "This summer, Oreo will introduce a new 'twist' on the iconic cookie: the Triple Double Oreo," they said in a statement. "Three chocolate Oreo wafers with two layers of creme — one classic vanilla, and one chocolate. While we tried our best to safeguard this news, we couldn't hold back the buzz."

Irony

I'm sure she can taste it. [Link]

In this anonymous Facebook exchange, a young woman proudly shows off her new "VEGAN" inner-lip tattoo to her friends; they offer her a string of congratulations that comes to an abrupt end when one friend points out that black tattoo ink is made from burnt animal bones, and thus the VEGAN in question will forever have an animal product in her mouth

I have nothing against vegetarians, in fact I respect that commitment quite a bit, but this is right up there with getting a tattoo of Chinese characters that don't quite mean what you think they mean.

Star Wars Dark Side Roast Coffee

You don't know the power of caffeine! [Link]

Get a taste of the Dark Side with this rich hand roasted coffee. Three diverse coffees and two different roasts create a full-bodied, sharp, cup with spicy undertones and smoky, dark-roasted complexity. Vader's Dark Roast Coffee is commonly enjoyed by Dark Lords of the Sith while planning new Death Star construction, but give into your anger, sample a steaming cup and you will be rewarded with power beyond your imagination.

And make sure you make it with your Mr. Coffee before watching the Mr. Radar.

MeatWater?

Eww. [Link]

I mean, I guess we can congratulate Till Krautkraemer for creating liquids that taste like a poached salmon salad, thai beef salad, cheeseburger or Hungarian goulash (best seller!). But doesn't half the appeal of eating meat lie in its physical properties?