Posts Tagged ‘Food’
Sidcuip Burger Bar Bans Wheelchair-Bound Woman For Smelling Bad
“BASICALLY I went into a cafe, it’s one that I always go to except during the summer I’ve been sitting outside. It wasn’t great weather so this time I sat inside. I got to my table where I normally sit. I made sure I was out of the way of everyone else. Despite this the guy working there, he basically said to me you cannot sit inside because the customers have complained about you.”
So says Kelly Sawyer, 34, of her visit to the Star Burger in Sidcup High Street,
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Sugar Is A Legal High: Low Fat Makes You Fat And John Yudkin Was Right
REMEMBER the war on fat? Fat was bad. Now sugar is the target of the bansturbators. It’s is like “crack cocaine”.
“Nothing gets me high as that sandwich cookie does. But I love the filling most. I rub it on my roast, mix it in with my coffee, and spread it on my toast. I love the white stuff, baby. In the middle of an Oreo.”
Weird Al Yankovic said that in 1992.
The Atlantic noted:
That concept has been shown before, but remains important. In a 2010 study published in Nature Neuroscience, rats who spent 40 days eating bacon, sausage, cheesecake, and frosting—someone please market that combination; I mean please don’t—became “addicted.” They continued eating even in the face of electrical shocks. Non-addict rats did not. The researchers, at Scripps Research Institute in Florida, likened the brain activity in the addict rats to that of cocaine and heroin addicts.
Biscuits are legal cocaine? They’re a legal high. Ban them!
The HuffPost:
Sugar is the ‘most dangerous drug of our time’, according to a senior Dutch health official, and should be treated accordingly. Paul van der Velpen, head of Amsterdam’s health service, suggests that food and drink with high-sugar content should come with health warnings. He suggests introducing hard-hitting campaigns similar to the anti-smoking messages found on cigarette packets.
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Is Jay Rayner An Idiot For Insisting That Food Is Too Cheap?
Families need to pay more for food and have become ‘far too used to paying too little’, Masterchef judge Jay Rayner told MPs today.
The food critic and author told a parliamentary committee that food was too cheap to support British farmers.
He said: ‘We pay too little. We’re far too used to paying too little. And the only way we have at our disposal, I think, to secure a robust food supply is by investing in British farming and that does mean consumers pay more and look for that label.’
There’s four sets of idiocy here.
The first is that no one at all is insisting that you must buy cheap food. If you want farmers to have more money you can quite happily go out and buy more expensive food: locally produced, organic, free range, whatever tickles your fantasy. If you really want to you can just stick some cash money through the farm gate.
The second is that a robust food supply is not achieved by relying upon the farmers of one country to supply it. You might have noticed that there’s not been any famines in the UK for the past century and a half or so. Which is about the same time that we’ve been importing a decent fraction of our food. The connection between these two being that when the weather makes the crops fail in this country, as it still does from time to time, we’ve got other places to get our food from.
The third is that the falling real price of food is one of the things that has made us all richer in recent decades. It really wasn’t all that long ago, within my lifetime, that food made up 30% of the average poor families’ monthly budget. It’s now more like 10%: freeing up money to be spent on other things, making us richer.
And finally, the fourth, is that if British farmers can’t make a profit doing farming this is the universe’s way of telling them to bugger off and do something else other than farming. In short, there’s just too many people trying to be farmers.
Yes, Jay Rayner is being an idiot here.
Man Finds Large Rat’s Head In His Chilli And Hard Beans
IT’S protein a-go-go at the Golden Corral in Florida, where Billy Wilson has found a large chunk of extra meat in his chilli dinner.
He tells the media:
“It’s usually pretty great. I go maybe once a week. The first bite I took out of it was a crunch, and at the time I was like, maybe you know, sometimes you get a hard bean inside of the chilli.”
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Posted: 22nd, October 2014 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Unsavoury Snacks: From Meat Sweets To Biohazards
ANORAK looks at unsavoury snacks, from meat sweets to biohazards.
When we think of sweets, we tend to think… well, SWEET.
OK, we might think of a shrimp…
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Posted: 8th, October 2014 | In: Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
Closed Chinese Restaurant Doesn’t ‘Give A Shit About Gluten Free’ Or ‘Believe In Organic’
GLUTEN free diners closed down a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.
SO’s staff walked out in disgust at being asked to “believe” in organic.
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Posted: 21st, September 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Local News Watch: The Peterborough Telegraph Reviews Pizza Express
LOCAL News Watch looks at a restaurant review in the Peterborough Telegraph:
Pizza Express has been based in Cathedral Square for a fair few years and though I’ve walked past it close to a hundred times, I’ve never ventured in – until now.
Holly Aston, 17, is at dinner with her mum. She embarks on a review that is devoid of the self-aggrandizing balls the the usual food critics churn out.
Highlights are
For the starter we ordered garlic bread with mozzarella and we were delighted when it arrived. It was one round piece of bread covered in cheese.
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Posted: 19th, September 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment
A Look Inside And Outside The All-Black Chicken
THE all-black Ayam Cemani Chicken of Indonesia is all black. Every bit of them – apart from the blood – is black:
Everything about it is black: plumage, beak, tongue, legs, toe nails, even its meat, bones, and organs! The only thing that is black is its blood – though it comes in a very dark shade. They get their black coloring from a generic trait known as ‘fibromelanosis’. I don’t know why you’d want to eat something that’s as black as a black hole, but don’t ever make the mistake of slaughtering it for a quick snack, because one chicken costs around $2,500!
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Posted: 3rd, September 2014 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Barbecues Make You Fat Pigs: Which Is The Whole Point Of Them
SO the Daily Mail tells us: we’re total and complete grossouts when we eat a barbecue. We eat far more at one than we do at a normal meal. All of which is terribly interesting but it is rather missing the point about a barbecue isn’t it? That they’re supposed to be the times when we pig out? It’s a bit like saying that we have more calories at dinner than we do with a lunchtime sandwich: that’s the bloody point!
It may not come as a surprise that a diet of sausages and ribs could leave you, well, a little porky.
But you probably didn’t realise that we eat up to three times more at a barbecue than in a normal meal.
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Posted: 27th, August 2014 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment
McDonald’s Terminates Worker Who Put Free Swastika In Woman’s Chicken Sandwich
LUCKY Charleigh Matice found a Swastika in her McDonald’s chicken sandwich, bought at a brand in Morehead City, North Carolina.
Eat yer heart out, Hamburglar. This is the surprise gift that will get the kids flocking to the store.
But Charleigh was upset by the free extra. She says her grandfather fought for the Allies World War II. It’s not what he would have wanted.
McDonald’s is swift to punish:
“We are very sorry for the service that our customers received, and to be clear we have terminated the employee who was involved. We do not tolerate that kind of behavior at McDonald’s, and it’s not what we stand for personally as owners. It is about providing the best level of service and care to our customers, and anything less than that is unacceptable to us.”
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Posted: 12th, August 2014 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
The world needs a bar run by GWAR
GWAR, the greatest band in the whole universe, have had a rough time of it, with key members of the group shrugging off their mortal coil to join the choir invisible.
However, things must continue and they’ve had a truly magnificent idea – GWAR BAR!
Gwar are looking for $50,000 through their Indiegogo page to open their own “gourmet junk food’ restaurant, which will be called, tremendously, ‘Gwar-B-Q’.
And the fun doesn’t end there, as this video will show.
The band promise that their establishment will “change the dining experience in much the same way that Gwar changed the concert-going experience (well, maybe, without quite as much mess).”
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Posted: 1st, July 2014 | In: Music, The Consumer | Comment
10 Revolting Packaged Foods That Taste Of Regret
STROLLING down Memory Lane on the way to Anorak Towers, we came across an old advertisement for Spangles – the sweet signifier of choice for lazy peddlers of nostalgia.
But instead of invoking it alongside Chopper bicycles and Spacehoppers, it invoked an earlier, less innocent time, when germs were everywhere, and the role of confectionary packaging wasn’t simply to announce the Old English delights within, but to keep dirt out. ALL dirt. Yes, that includes you, Foreign Dirt, coming over year and contaminating our indigenous flavours.
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Posted: 2nd, April 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
Sod The Sugar And The Salt We’re Allowed To Eat Fat Again
SO. Everything that we’ve been told about healthy eating for the past 30 years has turned out to be a mistake. Or a lie, your call:
For the health conscious reader who has been stoically swapping butter for margarine for years the next sentence could leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Scientists have discovered that saturated fat does not cause heart disease while so-called ‘healthy’ polyunsaturated fats do not prevent cardiovascular problems.
In contrast with decades old nutritional advice, researchers at Cambridge University have found that giving up fatty meat, cream or butter is unlikely to improve health.
They are calling for guidelines to be changed to reflect a growing body of evidence suggesting there is no overall association between saturated fat consumption and heart disease.
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Posted: 18th, March 2014 | In: Money, Reviews, The Consumer | Comment (1)
Whole Foods, The Paleo Diet And The New-Kosher Vitamineral Earth Are Creationism For Stupid Liberals
ORGANIC food and whole foods are a big marketing con for the gullible who think they know better than the rest of them. Right? Michael Schulson muses on those right-on liberals who “get riled up about creationists and climate-change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods”. Modern science is not a path on the old truths:
At times, the Whole Foods selection slips from the pseudoscientific into the quasi-religious. It’s not just the Ezekiel 4:9 bread (its recipe drawn from the eponymous Bible verse), or Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, or Vitamineral Earth’s “Sacred Healing Food.” It’s also, at least for Jewish shoppers, the taboos thathave grown up around the company’s Organic Integrity effort, all of which sound eerily like kosher law. There’s a sign in the Durham store suggesting that shoppers bag their organic and conventional fruit separately – lest one rub off on the other – and grind their organic coffees at home – because the Whole Foods grinders process conventional coffee, too, and so might transfer some non-organic dust. “This slicer used for cutting both CONVENTIONAL and ORGANIC breads” warns a sign above the Durham location’s bread slicer. Synagogue kitchens are the only other places in which I’ve seen signs implying that level of food-separation purity.
Look, if homeopathic remedies make you feel better, take them. If the Paleo diet helps you eat fewer TV dinners, that’s great – even if the Paleo diet is probably premised more on The Flintstones than it is on any actual evidence about human evolutionary history. If non-organic crumbs bother you, avoid them. And there’s much to praise in Whole Foods’ commitment to sustainability and healthful foods. Still: a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don’t Tell You, or Whole Foods’ overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article).
Why are so many whole food believers picky eaters..?
Posted: 3rd, March 2014 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comment (1)
Foodie Balls: Making Mushrooms With ‘Raindrops Tapping Me On The Collarbone And Hawks Screeching On The Updraft’
HOW do you make Porcini Mushroom Soy Sauce? Well, food blogger Hunger A Thirst For Life. Who is he?
I’m a wandering weed lover, wordsmith, teacher, and worshipper at the altar of tasty treats.
Ready? Let’s forage:
I have a some rituals that keep me content during the off-season, when conditions make it nearly impossible to forage. Most days begin standing at the east window, huddled around a steaming cup of nettle tea, while the candied dawn stretches and yawns over the horizon. Next, I shuffle my woolly slippers into the pantry in search of breakfast. Part food storage area, part temple to the growing season past, its shelves are packed with tins of herbs, and jars of pickles and preserves. There is something deeply satisfying about standing in the doorway and scanning the shelves. My preserves aren’t just aesthetically pleasing, they’re a treat to the ancient part of my brain that loves knowing I can feed myself. Also, there are memories stored inside the cell walls of those plants.
Invariably, in this winter morning ritual, my eyes settle upon the rows of dried porcini. My obsession. My prize. I’m compelled to the two gallon container that houses the finest mushroom slices. The ceremony goes like this — I lift the lid, close my eyes, genuflect, and nuzzle my entire face into the jar.
~~~inhale~~~The piano-wire tension connecting all things throughout the summer of ’12 as fires ravaged the mountainsides. The balm of honeyed relief when the rains finally came.
~~~smell~~~
Raindrops tapping me on the collarbone, bootsteps swallowed by sodden moss, hawks screeching on the updraft.
~~~breathe in~~~
Sugared soil and arrows of sunlight bolting through canopies of Englemann spruce. Dirty fingernails and my favorite knife.
~~~inspire~~~
Suspense, seduction, Mother Nature’s slight of hand. Mushrooms.
I season my meals with remembrances.
Take one mushroom and one bottle of soy sauce…
Posted: 6th, January 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Fat Flag: People Painted As Flags Eat That Nation’s Stereotypical Food
JONATHAN Icher’s Fat Flags is people painted as national flags eating the food most associated with that nation. So. The Italian eats pasta. The Frenchman eats the croissant. The British eat… Well, you could be intrigued. Scroll down the page and see. And know that Icher is French. Clue: it’s not humous, a kebab, chips, a supermarket ready-meal, a meaty spring roll or tandoori chicken.
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Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
Brilliant man invents the McEverything
WASTING time is a glorious endeavour and one writer has done something that is of zero use to anyone, but brilliant all the same.
He’s gone and invented the McEverything, which is basically the ultimate McDonald’s burger which has every sandwich on the menu contained within.
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Woman finds slice of multi-grain bread inside tobacco pouch
JESSICA Fairbairn found a slice of multi-grain bread in a 30g pouch of Port Royal tobacco purchased from the Countdown store in Massey, Auckland, New Zealand.
Brown bread. Might this be a play on rhyming slang and a statement on anti-smoking: brown bread means dead?
Says her mother Emma:
“It looked like Molenberg. It was folded in half, still fresh without any mould or anything. It was totally bizarre.”
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Posted: 3rd, May 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Animal rights activists wrap themselves in cling film
MEAT eaters, rejoice! The vegetarians have given in. To mark the Spain Day Without Meat Protest, animals rights activists from the group Animal Equality lie wrapped in meat packaging on the Barcelona pavements. Meat might be murder, but celophane is a slow suffocation. The stun gun would have been kinder:
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Posted: 20th, March 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Picky Portsmouth eater finds hairy lump in her mum’s lasagna
TO Portsmouth, where Shani Stock has found “a grisly hairy lump” in her mum’s lasagna. No, not the lodger. This was a lump of substance in the dish mum Trudy made using a £3 bag of frozen mince from Iceland.
The Portsmouth News reports:
Mum Trudy, 29, of Grove Road in Elson, Gosport is concerned as her daughter, already a fussy eater, now refuses to eat much else apart from crisps and picks through any meals she does agree to eat.
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Posted: 8th, March 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Junk (food) science: BBC says your sausage and bacon are killing you but offers no proof
THE Daily Mail states: “Processed meat ‘is to blame for one in 30 deaths‘.” Maybe. Maybe not.
The BBC echoes this ‘news’: “Processed meat ‘early death’ link.”
Sausages, ham, bacon and other processed meats appear to increase the risk of dying young…. Diets high in processed meats were linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer and early deaths.
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Posted: 8th, March 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
