Japan Gets the Best of Everything

Tomatoes and carrots are no longer reserved for your salad. Häagen-Dazs will be unleashing two new vegetable flavors in Japan on May 12, Rocket News reports. The new ice creams are part of a “Spoon Vege” series that includes Tomato Cherry and Carrot Orange.

While the flavor combinations may perplex you, they aren’t too different from the juicing mixes here in the States. The Tomato Cherry blends tomato’s subtle sweetness with cherry’s distinct sweet-sour taste, while the Carrot Orange delivers citrus notes to the savory carrot flavor. Both flavors will contain 8.5 percent milk half, just over half of Häagen-Dazs usual milk fat content.

For those in Japan looking to try these the veggie desserts, they’ll be available in 100 ml servings for 284 yen (US $2.77). If you’re a bit dazzled on what you’d top these with, try reaching for the vinaigrette.

I would totally eat the carrot orange ice cream. That sounds amazing.

Falafel Waffel

They do exist! In their completely horrific manner, they exist.

Altering how we taste our food

What can you taste when you swirl a mouthful of malt whisky around your mouth? Peaty flavours, honey, sea salt? Talk to any whisky drinker and they'll be happy to discuss at length.

But it turns out that not all you are getting is down to your taste buds - or even your nose.

If you drink a glass of single malt in a room carpeted with real grass, accompanied by the sound of a lawnmower and birds chirping, and all bathed in green light, the whisky tastes "grassier".

Replace that with red lighting, curved and bulbous edges and tinkling bells and the drink tastes sweeter.

These studies are intriguing. On one hand, I am expecting the large food companies like Nestle to start just advertising the pizza on the box with only a shake of the cheapest chemicals possible inside. On the other, it pretty much is like brain synesthesia for your mouth without your knowledge. Sit back and just let it happen.

Culture?

“These cheeses are meant only as ‘food for thought,’ ” Agapakis said. “What we hope is that after the first visceral response of ‘ew,’ we can start to think more about the intersections of human and microbial cultures.”

“Culture” in two ways, that is.

“Cheese is a wonderful artifact with which to demonstrate how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are not merely inseparable, but fully implicated in one another,” Heather Paxson, anthropologist and author of The Life of Cheese and toe bacteria donor, said.

I can understand the breast milk. I can understand the smelly and donkey. I cannot understand or stomach the idea of maggot cheese. I can't eat rice because it reminds me of maggots, and at least rice doesn't move.

The First Taste

A delightful look at children taking their first taste of some challenging foods. Filmed in high speed, stunning clarity, this film allows us to almost see the thoughts of these children on their faces.

100 Rules of Dinner

Coming from the blog Dinner, a Love Story, are the author's 100 rules for cooking.

11. No need to sift. Whisking is just as effective.
42. There is no such thing as owning too many little bowls.
63. Clean as you go. Seriously, I can’t stress this enough.

 Basically, I agree with a bunch of the ones on the list from Jenny, but I find almost all of Andy's to be worthless. I guess I just don't like the same flavors. I don't care for ice, I don't salt my water, garlic and spinach are amazing, and baking doesn't resemble homework.

 My personal few rules:

Always double (or triple) the garlic. 

There's always room for more vegetables in any recipe. 

Take the time to properly caramelize onions. 

Coconut oil is only acceptable if you can completely hide the flavor.

3D Gummi Person for $65

For only 6,000 yen, or roughly $65, it will take a 3D scan of your body, which is used to create a mold for the gummi stuff....The gummi-you (or me, but hopefully, you) was rolled out for a holiday called White Day, which is basically Japan’s second Valentine’s Day — women give presents on Feb. 14, and guys give them on March 14, and go figure it’s the guys who consider “tiny version of me made of gross candy” to be a really romantic gift. Or maybe it’s just the ladies who want to gnaw their boyfriends’ heads off.

I want a jello-shot version of one of these for my funeral. No one leaves until it has been devoured.

New FDA Food Safety Rules

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

Now it would be amazing if the rules are actually enforced once implemented.

Vegetables = Happiness

It’s a new research finding likely to be protested by 5-year-olds everywhere: People who eat more vegetables and fruits are significantly happier than those who eschew such foods.

Dartmouth University’s Daniel Blanchflower looked at the eating habits of 80,000 British citizens. He, alongside two British researchers, saw that mental well being — satisfaction with one’s life on a scale of one to 10 — rose alongside each serving of produce consumed daily.

Brussel sprouts make me happy. Spaghetti squash makes me happy. Vegetables are amazing. I concur with the results of this study.

How to Make Corn Dog Brownies

You know how sometimes you are really into two different things, and you think putting them together is a great idea, but it’s really not? Pottery and break dancing. Kittens and hang gliding. Drinking and operating heavy machinery. This is not one of those times. You’re bonkers for brownies and crazy for corn dogs, so it’s only right that you put them together in one awesome dinner/dessert of epig (get it!?!?) proportions.

i don't eat a lot of sweets to start with, but if someone fed me this as a joke, it would be a guarantee that I'd be off brownies forever.

IVF

Indeed, the woman's mouth had been essentially inseminated.

This really seems like the ultimate revenge by the squid for getting eaten.

Eat Less Meat

They found a 29% increase in pancreatic cancer risk for men eating 120g per day of red meat but no increased risk among women. This may be because men in the study tended to eat more red meat than women.

"If diet does affect pancreatic cancer then this could influence public health campaigns to help reduce the number of cases of this disease developing in the first place."

"Regardless of this latest research, we have already established a strong link between eating red and processed meat and your chances of developing bowel cancer, which is why WCRF [World Cancer Research Fund] recommends limiting intake of red meat to 500g cooked weight a week and avoiding processed meat altogether."

Brains...........

Artist Sara Asnaghi has sculpted brains out of different foodstuffs. If she did one for my food habits lately, it would be made of oatmeal, potatoes, squash and garlic.

The Amount of Sugar in your Food

Sugar Stacks shows exactly how much sugar is in your everyday foods. This site has been around for a few years, but still interesting. i also like the inclusion of fruit, so you can see what nature already gives you without the additional sugar you intake.

Fish Misrepresented

Recent studies indicate that between 20 percent and 70 percent or more of snapper, cod, grouper, and wild salmon are mislabeled at restaurants and stores. Oceana, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that is campaigning against seafood fraud, also discovered mislabeling this year when it conducted DNA tests of fresh and frozen fish at 15 Boston-area supermarkets. Nearly one in five fillets tested had the wrong species name, according to Oceana. Atlantic cod was the most frequently misrepresented fish.

Those were among the findings of a five-month Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish. It showed that Massachusetts consumers routinely and unwittingly overpay for less desirable, sometimes undesirable, species - or buy seafood that is simply not what it is advertised to be. In many cases, the fish was caught thousands of miles away and frozen, not hauled in by local fishermen, as the menu claimed. It may be perfectly palatable - just not what the customer ordered. But sometimes mislabeled seafood can cause allergic reactions, violate dietary restrictions, or contain chemicals banned in the United States.

Truly doubting this is any better elsewhere, especially since it's a lot harder to get actually fresh fish in a non-costal area.

Starbucks WiFi Ending?

It has been only just over a year since Starbucks announced that all stores would have free WiFi, and now it seems they are regretting the decision. In a true American fashion of getting something for nothing, there have been droves of people who come into the stores and soak up the free WiFi without spending any or much money. Rather than treat the company as a business, people have been using the stores as their own personal offices or living rooms.

So now Starbucks faces the dilemma of how to reduce the amount of time people are sitting and not buying, weighing options from limiting the time to a few hours to putting covers over the electrical outlets to limit the use to only as long as your battery lasts.

Personally, I am very curious how this will work out. I know when I was a barista, it was frustrating to have someone sit there all day and conduct their business from the seating area. Even though they were in a public place, often the people camped out would try to take over the entire seating area for their own, meeting clients and expecting the other patrons to be quiet and respect their needs only. While I can fully understand the need for some people to use public WiFi due to pricing or availability at home, that does not mean Starbucks or any company there should be expected to accept people who sit for half the day in their stores without the patrons paying back into their profits.

Food Variety

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.

Asparagus Cake

If I ever learn to like cake, this is totally one I would love to have. Not make, serve.

OCD Cutting Board

I really don't need to add to my problems by getting something like this. The ones I have now are plenty.

Smart Economics: Wrap the Naturally Wrapped and Triple the Price

I just do not understand the world. I don't. I can't. I get that people who comment online are at the exact same equivalent as me whining here, but nonetheless, what the hell goes through the brain of some people?

The health benefit of making fruit more available probably outweighs the cost of disposing of the wrapper. This a good example of free market innovation and jobs vs hysterical environmentalist pants wetting.. - John, Rockford, USA, 01/3/2011 23:38

Originating idea: Del Monte introducing individually wrapped bananas.