In the wake of the release of this year’s report on pesticide use in fruit and vegetable farming, The Atlantic’s food blog featured a list of the “dirtiest” and “cleanest” types of produce based on the amount of pesticides used on those crops. As usual, apples remain the most pesticide-laden item in the supermarket, while the least-pesticide-laden items include onions, sweet corn, watermelons, and cabbage.

You can bet this doesn’t get Alton Brown’s vote of approval: Plow & Hearth’s corn kerneler ($12.95) removes all the kernels from an ear of corn in one go. Me, I use my big-ass chef’s knife.

Back in 2009, I posted about a story in Gourmet Magazine abouth the plight of migrant farm workers indentured to the tomato farms in Immokalee, Florida and the efforts of a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to unionize the labor and improve the working conditions. Earlier this week, NY Times food columnist Mark Bittman posted an article about the ups and downs of that movement and about Barry Estabrook’s new book “Tomatoland”, which documents how industrialized agriculture has ruined tomatoes and created this modern slavery for farm workers.

Speaking of Gourmet Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine’s food blogger Lisa Bramen decided that she wanted to make a special birthday dinner for her husband using recipes from the year that he was born, 1978 (the year I turned 15, BTW). She searched through some of Gourmet’s recipes from that year and came up with a menu of Chicken Veronique, curried rice, a garden salad, and grasshopper pie. She sounds a little disappointed that the menu didn’t include family dinner fare like Sloppy Joes and tacos, but that’s why they called it “Gourmet”, chica. If she wanted to make the sort of crap we really ate in the 1970s, she should have gone through the back issues of Good Housekeeping. Still, it’s kind of a cute idea, even if it is a little too close to “Julie and Julia” territory. A back issue of Gourmet from August, 1963 is only $4.59 on Amazon.

You probably know that McDonald’s restaurants in countries other than the U.S. often developed special menu items to cater to the tastes and/or dietary restrictions of those countries. India has been a particular challenge, given that Mickey D’s speciality is beef burgers and Hindus don’t eat beef, but they have developed a whole menu for the India market. The paneer-based “McCurry Pan” you see in the image above is now being replaced with a sandwich made with a paneer patty (called the “McSpicy Paneer”, of course), which is being hailed as a triumph in development and production in the global marketplace according to this Business Today article.

Yes, that is EXACTLY what it looks like.

Thanks, Jane, but I’m trying to cut down on snacks.

Almost forgot this one: McDonald’s coffee machine full of maggots has been cleaned

I guess ol’ Jukka Mutanen must have finished his ride, because all the Finnish traffic dried up a day or two after my last post about You Know Where. But not everything in Finland is saunas and lingonberries: three people were killed in a shootout at a McDonald’s drive-thru near Helsinki. And you thought that shit only happened in America. Personally, I blame the Internet.

The Sonic is being built right next door to the McDonald’s, which cannot have the McDonald’s franchisee too happy. Previously, the space housed a car dealer. When the car showroom building was torn down a couple of weeks ago, everybody was abuzz wondering what would take the space, but now that the frame of the building is up, so is the large banner on the front of the site. No doubt the cognoscenti of our little suburb knew exactly what was going on well in advance, but for us hoi polloi it came down to a six-foot strip of vinyl tied to a temporary fence to bring the news.

It’s kind of a big deal, not just because our town lags behind all of its neighbors in sheer density of fast food chains that aren’t Dunkin’ Donuts, but because it’s only the second Sonic location in the entire state of Massachusetts. Indeed, it is only the second Sonic in ALL SIX New England states. The first Sonic opened last summer to much attention from cherry-limeade-starved souls, who were willing to endure two-hour lines, valet parking, and unholy traffic congestion on a major thruway (the infamous Route One strip). Needless to say, there is much tut-tutting and clucking by the villagers, who are worried that the already-busy section of Main Street will turn into a parking lot from all the looky-loos who will descend on us like a plague of french-fry-devouring locusts.

Having grown up in Maine in the 1970s, I have been down this road before. When we first moved to Lewiston-Auburn in the summer of 1971, there was only one McDonald’s for a “metro” area of about 70,000, and it was way on the outskirts of Lewiston, close to the Maine Turnpike exit. It was a huge deal when, several years later, a second McDonald’s was built on the Auburn side of the river, and then equally big deals ensued when Burger King arrived a few years after that, and finally, when I was in high school, Wendy’s. Maine, however, is always late to the party for the expansion of national retail chains; there are still only a small handful of Starbucks in the whole state (our town in Massachusetts got its Starbucks two years ago, but they are numerous in the Boston area).

In a bit of serendipity, this infographic is making the rounds online. It shows the distribution of the major fast-food burger chains in the United States. Here’s the Fast Company article that brought the map to the attention of the Internet, and here’s the original blog post from a site called WeatherSealed.com. The Fast Company version changed the background color to make the McDonald’s locations (which were plotted in black against a black background in the original) stand out better. It’s interesting to see that McDonald’s base is so tightly concentrated in the Northeast, but even more interesting to see the predominance of other chains in other regions: Dairy Queen, which is a rarity here in the Northeast and operates almost exclusively in its form as an ice cream stand, OWNS the South Central region in a way that McDonald’s can only dream of.

For the sake of the franchisee, I hope the arrival of Sonic goes better than the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts a few years ago. The anticipation behind the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Medford was nothing short of insane, and the initial customer response was enormous, but after about a year the whole thing died right off and the Kripsy Kreme chain itself went into bankruptcy. The retail location sat empty for a long time before finally being picked up by the beloved local chain of roast beef sandwich shops, Kelly’s. Meanwhile, the Ghost Town Plaza across the street sure could use half a dozen tenants.

A couple of months ago, there were murmurs that the cheapskate airline Ryanair thought they might be able to get away with removing the seats from airplanes altogether and making passengers stand up like they do on buses and subway cars. That hasn’t happened…yet…but today’s Daily Mail features a mock-up of a design for an aircraft with little jumpseats all crammed together that could very well find its way into service for short-hop flights. As the article points out, the military already uses similar seating to maximize passenger space in troop planes, so it’s not as outrageous as it sounds. Even the designers admit, though, that such seating wouldn’t be comfortable for more than an hour or two. I have to say that I myself would be okay with this for such quickie flights as the Boston-New York shuttles, as long as there was a related price decrease to go along with the inconvenience, but I can also imagine some of the more marginal American airline companies trying to get away with this for longer flights, too.

This story got posted to MetaFilter yesterday and now it’s all over the place: The BBC Magazine features this story of the only woman to ever serve in the French Foreign Legion. Susan Travers was a typical British socialite who wanted to “do her bit” when the Second World War began and became an ambulance driver for French troops fighting against the Russians in Finland. From there, she wound up in North Africa, and when the regular French Army wouldn’t have her, she talked her way into being a driver for the French Foreign Legion. Read the article for the rest of the amazing, romantic, and true story. Or, better yet, read the book. Personally, I can’t wait to see this turned into a movie.

The insanely small sculptures of artist Willard Wigan are not unfamiliar to people who spend any amount of time on the web, but I was very impressed with this tiny replica of Michelangelo’s “David” shown here on the head of a pin with a housefly for size comparison. This post at Laughing Squid also links to a presentation by Wigan at the TED conference, and tells us that Wigan’s art is presently being shown at the Nicole Gallery in Chicago.

This infographic shows a map of the United States represented by the proximity of McDonald’s restaurants. It’s a bit more impressive in its full size, which you can see at its original posting location here. Most Americans live no more than 2 miles from a McDonald’s, it turns out, except whomever it is that might live in this remote corner of South Dakota, which is 145 miles by road to the nearest MickeyD’s. (I suspect that, in fact, nobody lives in that spot, it’s just the one farthest to any McD’s in the U.S.)

A Chicagoland McDonalds’ has a new sign in front of their restaurant that lets you know when breakfast is being served under the Golden Arches. As you can see in this series of photos, the “egg” cracks open to reveal one sunny-side-up interior when the breakfast shift begins, then closes back up once the menu shifts to the rest of the day’s fare. Not unlike the drool-inducing “Hot Donuts Now” neon signs that are in the windows of what few Krispy Kreme donut shops remain in business. (via)

Now they just need something for the rest of the day. Perhaps a guy who has a heart attack every time another batch of fries is ready.

Pamela Low, the food chemist who developed the sugar coating for Capn’ Crunch cereal, passed away last Friday. According to the Boston Globe obit, she based the formula on a brown sugar syrup her grandmother used to pour over rice to serve as a dessert treat. Millions of American dentists owe their fortunes to this woman as several generations of children destroyed their teeth with the sweet crunchy goodness.

Meanwhile, on the salty side of the snack street, MSNBC reports that the inventor of CheezWhiz has died. But even though he deserves recognition for that invention, his legend only grows from there, as he also went on to develop the McDonalds french fry. This man, my friend, has had more impact on American culture than almost any other single individual of the last half-century.

(I think it’s only fitting that he died of a heart attack, don’t you? I’d hate to think he choked on a celery stick or something)

Following up a bit on yesterday’s post about the difference between food porn and actual fast food, here’s a website from a fellow who has made a habit of collecting McDonald’s hamburgers and “preserving” them for years. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

I used quotations around the word preserve, because all he really does is leave them out in the open air and let them dry up. The preservatives and such involved prevent the burgers from getting moldy, so that eventually they wizen up and look like “apple doll” burgers, if you will.

The oldest one in his collection is the one pictured above, from 1989. That burger is old enough to vote!