Not quite a year ago came the first news that rising-star chef Grant Achatz was seriously ill. In what can only be called the cruelest irony I have ever heard, it was announced that he had Stage IV cancer of the tongue and might lose his tongue altogether to the only recommended treatment for the disease, radical surgery.

Then, a couple of months later, a news item that he had opted to decline the surgery in favor of a largely untried regimen of chemo and radiation therapy. (The WSJ link in that post still works, so I recommend reading it for background). Less than a month after that, the announcement of a book deal AND the news that the tumor had been reduced 80% by the chemo/radiation therapy.

Ten months after the original diagnosis, which came with the likelihood that he would die within weeks, Achatz’s tumor is gone. And, according to this excellent New Yorker profile from last week’s issue, so is most of his sense of taste (a side effect of the radiation therapy). But his tastebuds are slowly beginning to return, and his type-A level of determination and drive never left, and so he is back in the kitchen thinking up recipes, relying on a cadre of sous chefs to do his tasting for him. His prognosis is not certain; typically patients with this sort of oral cancer only have a 30% survival rate after three years, however patients who received the chemo/radiation therapy in an earlier trial had a 70% 3-year-survival rate.

Meanwhile, Achatz tells writer D.T. Max that he is fascinated by the process of having his palate return a little bit at a time. The ability to taste sweetness is the last taste sensation to go and the first to return. Doctors and researchers have observed that patients who lose their sense of taste eventually lose their desire to eat altogether, and the human instinct for eating sweet foods is perhaps our most deeply ingrained sensory experience. Over the winter, his ability to taste saltiness has begun to return, but his ability to sense fat remains elusive (we perceive fat as creaminess or richness in our taste). If he is lucky, all his tastebuds might return within a year. For now, he pushes on.

Here’s a bunch of food-related links that aren’t necessarily inter-related, but I wanted to share them with you:

Former “America’s Next Top Supermodel” contestant Elyse Sewell went to South Korea lately and tried a dish that contained dog meat (a common ingredient in several Asian cuisines). Guess what? It tasted like dog. (via)

There is a growing realization that despite the sensible opposition to genetically-modified food, we may have no choice but to make use of it anyway to combat the problems with food productivity in developing countries because we’ve fucked up the ecosystem so badly. Monsanto, the corporation most involved in designing and marketing GM crops and the targeted pesticides and fertilizers that go along with them, clearly recognized the inevitability of this a long time ago, which is why they have no compunction about strong-arming American farmers.

A couple of weeks ago, Laura Shapiro wrote this piece for Slate taking celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay and his ilk to task for being out of touch with the reality of the situation faced by most home cooks in America: what he says should be a quick-fix dinner is a huge task for the home cook who gets home at 5:30 and needs to have dinner on the table at 6:00. Celebrity chef cookbooks, she complains, all expect you to have a traditional butcher on hand, ready access to expensive and hard-to-find ingredients, a full batterie de cuisine, and the skills of…well, Gordon Ramsay. She’s not wrong in a number of ways. Celebrity chef cookbooks in particular are the most guilty of engaging in food pornography and outsized expectations, and even Ramsay himself admits that he doesn’t cook for his family at home. She correctly observes that the genre of “quick meal” cookbooks (which the Ramsay book claims to be but surely is not) offer solutions that only work if you do such revolutionary things as plan ahead, shop in bulk, and learn how to fucking cook (Sorry, I’m channeling Gordon a bit myself). And that’s where I lose sympathy. Anyone who really thinks they can whip up a celeb-chef-quality meal in 30 minutes without any advance effort or expertise will also believe that they can lose weight without dieting and exercise, can make a fortune in real estate with only $10, or can have a penis bigger than the Eiffel Tower with just one little pill. 3QuarksDaily blogger Abbas Raza agrees with Shapiro, but takes his own tack: he’s all about taking the time to enjoy being in the kitchen when he cooks. Professionals need to learn how to be as efficient and multitasking as possible, amateurs do not. How can you enjoy eating the meal if you don’t enjoy making it?

If you haven’t read this New York Times article about how the increasing cost of fuel is being reflected in the price of food due to the sometimes bizarre transportation involved, please do. As I have said before, locavorianism might sound like just more fooodie snobbishness right now, but within a few years it’s going to become the way of life for most people, just as it was for centuries.

Harper’s Magazine has this great story about the foodie craze for raw milk and how some dairy farmers have created large and elaborate bootlegging operations to deliver the product to consumers while evading the efforts of the FBI. Some people claim that raw milk helps restore necessary bacteria in our intestines that fight off the increasing number of food allergies being diagnosed, helps reduce the number of unwanted hormones and steroids we ingest from milk produced by large commerical dairies, and that it’s just plain better tasting. This is an informative and well-researched article — don’t be surprised to see it pop up as a book down the road.

My friend Jo pointed me to this company’s webpage, which features beater blades with rubber scraper edges. They have one to fit just about every major model of stand mixer, and this definitely qualifies as a “Why didn’t they think of that before?” item.

Lastly, you probably read that Mars is buying Wrigley’s Gum. I would make a joke here about Uranus and the Hershey Highway, but I’ll let you figure out something on your own.

This one is for my friends over at Cocktailians. Have one on me, boys…

The latest issue of Esquire Magazine has a short article by David Wondrich about a noxious new libation some of his drinking companions have concocted, the WhiskeyBurger.

Now, I know waht you’re thinking — “Hmm, whiskey in a hamburger? That might be good…” — but you would be wrong. Because it’s a DRINK, not a BURGER, and you make it by infusing rye whiskey with cooked ground chuck beef. After the beef has soaked in the booze for an hour, you strain the liquid, discard the meat, and let the liquid chill in the fridge for a couple of hours so that all the rendered fat separates and hardens, just as if you were making beef stock.

This vile product, which he calls “beefskey”, is mixed with a sweet tomato syrup, a dash of “mustard bitters”, and garnished using three words that don’t ordinarily go together: “lettuce-onion foam”. Oh, and not to worry because he gives you the recipes for all of these disgusting mixers, too.

Mm-mmm! Okay, Cocktailians, give it a try!

Be aware that tomorrow, Tuesday, April 29, is Free Cone Day at your local Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shop.

When we first moved to the Boston area a dozen years ago, we lived within walking distance of a Ben & Jerry’s in Arlington Center, but the store has long since changed hands a couple of times (although it is still an ice cream shop), and we live a good 10 miles away from there now. The Ben & Jerry’s store locator tells me that there is nothing closer than Harvard Square, and that particular location isn’t even a full-blown shop, it’s a sort of kiosk in a tiny mall. I’ll probably just go buy a pint and some cones and the three of us can pretend that they were free. On the positive side, though, we’ll get much more generous scoops than they dish up for Free Cone Day, and we won’t have to take whatever flavor they’re giving away like-it-or-not (though, truth be told, there aren’t many B&J flavors that are totally unlikeable).

Wherever you live, I hope you’re in a better position to score a freebie. Ice cream wants to be free.