Sometimes FoodNetworkHumor.com is a little too mean-spirited for my taste, but I smiled at this spoof of “Chopped” by guest poster Joe Cristalli. The only thing missing is the sneering grimace of Alex Guarnaschelli.

This Sustainable is Good.com article looks at some of the differences between the same food product as sold and marketed in the U.S. and in the U.K. using the example of Kellogg NutriGrain bars. I was intrigued by this factoid:

In Europe manufacturers need to prove an ingredient is SAFE beyond a shadow of a doubt for it to be approved for use.

In the US researchers need to prove an ingredient is DANGEROUS beyond a shadow of a doubt for it to be banned.

And while we’re on the subject of American food regulations, did you know that the USDA is allowing Monsanto to police its GMO products as part of a two-year “experiment”. Considering that they’ve done such a GREAT job so far while the USDA has been watching, this ought to go swimmingly.

Just yesterday I posted about Adam Richman, who, for the last several years, has traveled around the country eating simply enormous servings of food, and noted that even he has had to cry “No más” and hand over the eating to other people. But according to this news story in Nation’s Restaurant News, restaurant patrons are finally giving up their love for oversized portions. Younger diners in particular are paying more attention to eating less.

A bit along that same trend somewhat is this latest Gallup poll that shows that beer drinking in the U.S. has declined, again especially among younger individuals. That’s not to say they’re drinking less alcohol — they are substituting wine — but maybe the twentysomethings might not turn out to be the same lard-asses we have.

I’m a little disappointed to hear this: after a very big push over the last several years to reduce or replace sodium in their soups, Campbell’s has decided to give up and go back to their previous formulations of their primary soups in an effort to revive sales. This doesn’t affect their other product lines, including the popular Healthy Request products, just the classic soups.

Talk about your bad timing…the one time of year when everybody trots out their recipes for egg nog, Christmas cookies, and other holiday treats, and the FDA has issued a recall on ground nutmeg. Luckily, it only affects two specific brands, but one of those brands is Whole Foods’ 365 label. The other is a bulk product from Frontier Natural Products; less likely to be something in a home kitchen, but probably an issue for commercial kitchens.

I really don’t see the point, but apparently an English company that sells chile peppers has cross-bred several of the super-hot species to create a hybrid 30% hotter than the world’s hottest pepper, the so-called “ghost pepper” bhut jolokia. The new pepper, called the Naga Viper (as seen above), registers 1.35 MILLION Scoville Units as compared to the already-insane 1 million Scovilles for the bhut jolokia. To put that into context, here’s a chart of how various peppers and capsaicin extracts rate on that scale. Jalapeño peppers are a measly 5000 Scovilles, cayenne scores 50,000 Scovilles, and habañeros 350,000. The absolute hottest thing on that chart, though, is pure capsaicin at an unbelievable 16 million. Pretty much everything above a million Scovilles is some sort of extract, with the exception of these several new hybrids, so they’ve probably hit the limit for how hot a fruit can go.

This Bobulate post addresses something that most experienced cooks know: that recipe times are generally bullshit. The author quotes no less an authority on the subject that Cook’s Illustrated publisher Christopher Kimball, who acknowledges that cooking times in recipes are approximate at best, often ginned up out of thin air, and are more a function of marketing than cooking. He even goes so far to say that there is no such thing as a 30-minute recipe, even though he publishes a cookbook that purports to feature exactly that. But, then again, maybe that’s his whole point. (NOTE: as of the time of this post, the Bobulate link is unavailable due to some downtime at tumblr.com)

Monsanto’s full-court press to get the world hooked on its genetically modified foods hit a snag recently when a federal judge ordered their GMO sugar beets physically removed from fields after the USDA violated an earlier ruling forbidding the planting of the Roundup-ready sugar beet seeds. The problem, though, according to this Fast Company story, is that use of Monsanto’s seeds among sugar beet growers is so common that it accounts for 20% of the entire sugar production in the United States and the ban may well lead to a sugar shortage over the next two years. Considering that we’re on our way to being a nation of diabetics, it might not be a bad thing for sugar to be scarce for a while.

One of my clients is an artist and she has been working on a series of bronze plaques that have engravings of various insects on them. On one of my recent visits to her, she showed me a book she had been looking at by an artist named Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who has made hundreds of drawings of insects mutated by radiation in places like Chernobyl and other sites in Europe that were affected by that disaster. Earlier this week, coincidentally enough, Wired had a post about Hesse-Honegger that features a great slideshow of some of her excellent drawings. You can read more about her work here.

Last year, there were lots of reports about the huge losses of bee populations in the U.S. due to what is called “colony collapse disorder”. Sadly, things are only getting worse for bee keepers, as the latest survey shows that a full one-third of all managed bee colonies in the United States died over the winter, but only about 5% due to colony collapse disorder. Most of the die-off is being attributed to weather-related starvation and harsh conditions. You know, that “giant conspiracy of government and industry” called global climate change.

Last week, the NY Times had a story about the rise of Roundup-resistant weeds on farms that used Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant GM soybeans, and now there is this story from the Manchester (UK) Guardian about the emergence of huge insect infestations in China, where farmers have been using Monsanto’s GM varieties of cotton. On one hand, this ought to shut up all the people who continue to insist that evolution is “just a theory”, but on the other hand didn’t everybody SAY this was what would happen with GM crops about, oh, a BAJILLION TIMES?!?!

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.