Coming Soon: Shut Up, Baobob

The International Food Institute has a report on the hot new flavor trends:

Nut flavors, including cashews, almonds, and pistachios, are moving into drinks, milks, and yogurt. Hot spicy ingredients such as chilies are moving into candy, and cooling spice and herb ingredients such as cinnamon, coriander, anise, ginger, and mint, are moving into dairy, ice cream, and gums. Plum, coffee, e.g. cappuccino wafers or chocolate latte macchiato cookies, rhubarb, chai, golden kiwi, cloudberry, baobab, and coffee berry are among the emerging flavors. Yogurt is enjoying a renaissance with vegetable flavors ranging from cucumber and dill to orange and carrot. Flower flavors are moving into the global market, e.g., jasmine-flavored lattes, blackberry and violet yogurt, and rose petal drinks. New berry alternatives, e.g., mountain huckleberry, garden berries, or field berries, are also emerging, sometimes coupled with exotic fruit flavors.

I also like their use of “moving,” as if flavors are little migrants. Look out for Arizona, spicy ones!

Across the Pond

black and white photo of two barristers in wigs

The comments in response to this article about confusing food labels in England are completely astonishing in their politesse and helpfulness! WTF Britain? Did you not get the memo about meanonymity? Check out this exchange:

OK but why this regrettable use of swearword, a spot of rage creeping in to your usually level-headed and articulate posts?

No rage … but maybe disillusionment! Nothing wrong with a bit of swearing. Anyway, I thought it looked good at the time, but if there was an edit button I would remove it. 😉 And thank you for the roundabout compliment. 🙂

Seriously they probably need an emoticon for bowing. They also have superb user names like Morgana LeFay and Tiresias. So literary!

Carla Bruni Is No Fool

From these chickens, we Americans make magic eggs!

Mrs. President of France declined to go on Michelle Obama’s First Lady Hayride, which involved taking the  spouses of various global leaders to a farm where they could see farm stuff. Because obviously other nations do not know about this thing Americans do, farming.

Later, Ms. Obama took the First Partners to see a sidewalk and an elevator.

Look Out Foodies–Nathan Myhrvold Is Coming For You

Oh Nathan Myhrvold. Classic geek overachiever! Not content with making meelyuns at Microsoft, he recently solved a little problem we like to call global climate change:

Myhrvold appeared on CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS and discussed his idea to eliminate global warming/climate change using geoengineering. It involves using hoses suspended 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from the Earth into the atmosphere via helium balloons. The hoses would be placed near the North Pole and the South Pole and emit sulfur dioxide, which is known to scatter light. Myhrvold estimated that such a configuration could “easily dim the sun by one percent, and even do it in a way that wouldn’t be visible.”

It’s kind of like giving the Earth a pair of atmospheric sunglasses!

But there’s no money in solving global warming. For his next trick, Myhrvold would like to take $625 from every sous-vide loving molecular foodie who likes to use words like “colloidal” and “vacuum compression.” They don’t call them $25-dollar words for nothing, which is why Myhrvold’s forthcoming book Modernist Cuisine is going to cost so darn much. He has worked hard on it! From the New York Times:

He has spent three years in a laboratory in Bellevue, Wash., testing and adapting the increasingly complex cooking techniques emerging at restaurants like El Bulli, the Fat Duck and WD-50. Where other cookbook writers use whisks and graters, Dr. Myhrvold, who amassed hundreds of millions of dollars at Microsoft, wields vacuum sealers, colloid mills and rotary evaporators, and ingredients like agar and methylcellulose.

The aesthetic of nerdy excess even applies to the book’s form, as the Times notes:

[N]ot even Dr. Myhrvold, who started his own publishing company for this book, has seen a final copy.More than 65,000 lines of text and 3,500 photographs and illustrations are being checked (the ink alone for each copy weighs four pounds). The book’s custom-designed box-within-a-box container, meant to protect the heavy volumes during shipping, failed a series of drop tests and is being re-engineered.

Never let it be said that Mr. Myhrvold does not know his audience. Scott Heimendinger, aka The Seattle Food Geek, told the Times: “I have not been this excited for anything since the release of the second ‘Star Wars’ movie.”

And never let it be said you can’t get more for less—Amazon has already marked Modernist Cuisine down to $500. Maybe they put it through a sous vide.