If Martinez wants each member of her household to have one peach, it’ll cost her about $3.
If she chooses Kraft macaroni and cheese, she can get 18 servings — with 400 calories and 580 milligrams of sodium in each — for the same price.
From a great piece on how farm subsidies (also–can we not just call them money subsidies?) affect access to food.
(*^%^#$&^%$&^@#
Every day I try to get gum from the vending machine. I get other things sometime: seltzer (E4), or dried asian pear (D3) (shut up), but the gum I try for daily. Why do I say try? Because the goddamn motherfucking gum never drops down into the place where you stick your hand to get it. YET I KEEP TRYING. I know, Freud, insanity, etc. BUT LOOK! You can see that the gum packets on either side of the Doublemint are still behind the gate, but the Doublemint is in front of the gate yet still behind the plexiglass. AN INJUSTICE.
You guys, last night I was totally craving testicle pizza and testicles in bechamel sauce flavored with a variety of herbs and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I know I say this all the time, but I should have been in Serbia. There, in Belgrade, the World Testicle Cooking Championship just took place! People, it is not just about eating kangaroo testicles. It is about bravery, according to the organizer. They even give out an award for being “ballsy.” This year the winners were President Obama (somebody tell Maureen Dowd!) and Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who landed in the Hudson back in Jan 09. Strangely, neither was present to accept his award.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, in USA Today:
On like items, Whole Foods is very competitive. … We have 30,000 items, and you can probably find 30 on which we’re more expensive. Look at our 365 private-label line, which we price against Trader Joe’s. We match their prices. But you can’t always be cheapest if you have the highest quality.
This is what people are always saying about Whole Foods. “On a lot of things it’s so much cheaper!” Well, yes, their prices on organic peach granola might be cheaper than organic peach granola is at your corner store that isn’t making big orders because they need to have a variety of price points on their shelves. But if all you can afford (or want!) is Cheerios or something, that “cheaper at Whole Foods” thing is kind of a joke.
Verily, it is he. Sir Francis Bacon.
Time magazine’s Josh Ozersky on sub-par bacon:
Even more depressing is the fact that these flaccid slices are found sprawling, like rotting seaweed, atop the very sandwiches that promise veritable meatgasms upon consumption — the giant, multilevel calorie bombs that you see think pieces written about.
Animals in their pre-bacon state
Like cupcakes could ever be more irritating. Bacon is bigger than ever! It’s so big, it’s moving on to new animals. Chicago TimeOut says that chefs are now making bacon out of veal, beef, and lamb. Nothing is safe. We actually probably will have cupcake bacon before long.
In a compelling story (OK, not really) about the chef Roger Mooking, the writer was able to extract the following quotes, but never found out why the hell Mooking changed his name from Moo in the first place. HOW COULD YOU NOT ASK THAT?
“Working in a kitchen is like working in construction – on crack. “It’s also like being an air fighter pilot: Your mind is firing, people are cussing at you, you’re sweating. And then you come back for more the next day. There’s a mania to it. There’s also a self-destructive mania to creating things that don’t last. That world is a comfort zone for me.”
“These fritters are da bomb!”
“I want a cat woman in a tight chef’s jacket and her boots would have fat, red break-dancer’s laces and chef’s knives coming out of them.”
“Even when I was just out of the crib, I’d leave the house in Trinidad, naked, find my way to the other side of the island, and come back home, fully clothed, with a new haircut, like, ‘What’s up, man? What’s for lunch?’ I was always on the move.”
“I drive a Hyundai!”
“I may be chopping onions under really expensive lights and through a really expensive lens, but I’m still chopping onions! You know what I mean?”
I can’t be against a store that has 3,000 square feet of Pop-Tarts. I will be going there tomorrow! However, I am taken aback when I read things like this:
The shop’s focus will be a cafe offering about 30 new Pop-Tart treats like “ants on a log,” Kellogg says. That’s celery with peanut butter, sprinkled with wild grape Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tart “sushi” is a combination of three fruit varieties rolled together in a fruit wrap and sliced to look like a sushi roll.
For the love of god, flavor fatigue is one thing, but don’t mess with ants on a log.
Update: I have just learned that the store has “an hourly light show that simulates the look of frosting.” A FROSTING PLANETARIUM. A FROSTITARIUM!
First, visitors will “get frosted,” Mr. Schoessel said, with a red light and a white light. That will be followed by brief pulses of light, “all different colors to mimic the sprinkles,” he said, “then another really bright light” to evoke wrapping the tarts in foil.
I’m just guessing, but I think you’d probably want to get “baked” before getting “frosted,” if you “know” what I “mean.”
The Times has a loving post up about the Toddy Brewing System for iced coffee. It’s essentially a redux of the how to cold-brew iced coffee story they ran in 2007, with the addition of using the Toddy instead of your own filters. But what neither story noted is that making coffee this way is almost three times as expensive. Here’s the math, based on the current piece.
The Times recipe calls for 16 ounces of coffee, which yield 48 ounces of concentrate. The writer recommends using concentrate and coffee at a 1:1 ratio, so you’ve got 96 ounces of iced coffee, or 12 8-ounce cups.
If you were making regular coffee, those same 16 ounces, or 32 tablespoons, would give you 32 cups of coffee, using the general 1 tablespoon of coffee per cup. That’s nearly three times as many. Even if you are a profligate spendthrift and use 2 tablespoons per cup, you’d still get 16 cups, 25% more.
I’m not saying don’t cold brew your coffee if you want to. It’s a (mostly, kinda) free country! But it’s irresponsible not to note the big leap in cost here. It really fascinates me to see how much the Times dining—dining! not eating—section, in the same paper where I read about the economy on a daily basis, rarely notes prices or costs in any kind of real-world way. They just started giving nutrition info on recipes, I think they should start giving estimated costs.
I admit to being slightly paranoid that I did the math wrong here but I think it’s right.