The Slate “Explainer” column explains what horrible torment your last few minutes of life will be if you ever ingest so much as a single crystal of those little silica gel packets that come tucked into just about everything. A more gruesome end one can scarcely imagine. (Not really, they’re totally harmless)
It’s not for nothing that political candidates call the endless parade of banquets and luncheons the “Rubber Chicken Circuit”. This article at The Economist’s “Intelligent Life” magazine looks at the disconnect between what people want from banquet food and what a hotel or restaurant can realistically manage to do for a large group and how some chefs are trying to up their game by getting away from rubber chicken a la king and trying cooking methods and cuisines that are better suited to the vagaries of serving several hundred people simultaneously.
Speaking of chicken…it should not be a surprise to anyone that Americans have an overwhelming preference for “white” meat (in other words, chicken breast), spurred partially by the machinations of the poultry producers and partially by our infantilized palates. But until they perfect the process for growing meat without growing the chicken, every bird has two legs as well as a breast. That’s a lot of meat left over, too much to even consider just throwing away, and so the poultry producers export all those chicken legs to other countries where people LOVE them. This Slate article says that the biggest importer of American chicken legs for years has been Russia, but the Russians are trying to boost their domestic poultry production and so are buying less and less from us. Given the state of the economy and the ecological disasters waiting for us on the horizon, Americans need to wise up, stop being fussy, and start eating dark meat. It tastes better anyway.
The USDA has an online interactive “Food Environment Atlas” that you can use to explore county-by-county census data as it relates to a variety of food and health concerns. A website called “Daily Yonder” used the atlas to generate this map of the U.S. showing the number of fast-food restaurants per capita and then some additional infographics for several related vectors: obesity, exercise, amounts of types of food eaten (soft drinks, vegetables, meat), and amount of per-person spending on fast food. There’s no sort of master index that pulls all of this together in that post, but taken as a group the maps do point out trends.
We occasionally enjoy watching the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern. I have to say that probably a good 75% of the stuff he eats actually looks just fine to me; not to harp on a point too much, but Americans as a group are appallingly infantile about their food preferences, and a lot of the things he samples are not so much gross as they are merely culturally unappealing because they’re unfamiliar. Once in a while you can tell that even Zimmern has to man up to eat a few things that clearly don’t taste good, but he never shirks from something just because it’s weird. Well, almost never. I think I’d pass on that, too.
In The Atlantic, local chef Chris Parsons writes about the 2011 Bocuse d’Or competition that was recently held in Lyon, France. You may recall that I blogged about his Bocuse d’Or posts last year, too. Parsons himself was a competitor in 2009.
Required reading:
This Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin by Michael Joseph Gross hit the web yesterday. Let’s hope it does for her career what the VF profile of General Stanley McChrystal did for his.
Jane Mayer’s profile of the Kochs, David and Charles, in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago also helps to put a little sunlight on the monsters behind the Tea Party. If nothing else, it shows that Rupert Murdoch isn’t the only evil supervillian trying to take over the world. Now we just need a real-life James Bond to take these motherfuckers out.
Matt Taibbi is up to his usual snuff with a Rolling Stone post about the recent primary elections and the influence the Tea Party did and did not have on the outcome, and the insidious race-baiting of Murdoch’s FOX News.
Christopher Hitchens proves that he isn’t dead yet by giving the ol’ one-two to the Beckapalooza of last weekend. As infuriating as he is, we are going to sorely miss Hitch when he is gone. (If you’ve got the time, I also recommend this long video featuring interviews with teabaggers at the Beckapalooza for an up-close-and-personal look at the terminally stupid)
The always-funny “stupid customer” website Not Always Right.com had a little precautionary tale about what happens when teabaggers show up to vote.
And here’s a little history lesson about the origins of the Tea Party and its ilk:
Here’s a handful of things I wanted to share with you that didn’t seem to fit into posts of their own:
Everybody’s linking to Christopher Hitchens’ article in the newest issue of Vanity Fair wherein he talks a little bit about his recent diagnosis of esophageal cancer. I think it’s pretty impossible not to have a love-hate thing about Christopher Hitchens, because he manages to hold extremely contrasting opinions on a variety of subjects and argues his case so vehemently regardless of the side he’s on, but anytime someone has to come to terms with the suddenness of their own mortality and can do so in such an honest and unflinching way, it deserves to be appreciated. Additionally, you might want to read Hitchens’ Slate piece about confronting his lifelong issues with alcohol that came out just before he learned that he had cancer.
In a similar vein, I liked this interview with Penn Jillette in the June Vanity Fair. No, there’s nothing wrong with Jillette, but he’s cut from the same iconoclastic cloth as Hitchens and is equally able to hold his own passionately on sometimes diametrically opposing ideas.
Here’s a good article from Esquire by writer Chris Jones about a fellow named Terry Kniess, who appeared as a contestant on “The Price Is Right” in 2008 and was the first person since 1972 to guess the price of his showcase exactly correct down to the last dollar. Even as it was happening, the show’s producers were sure Kniess was cheating, but they couldn’t prove it right away. Eventually they came up with some clues…but you need to read the story to get the whole thing. Additionally, I recommend this MetaFilter post from the time when the episode aired, which includes a lot of discussion and some other related links that help flesh out the whole affair.
Ytterby, Sweden is a small town near Stockholm that has the particular distinction of being the namesake of not one, not two, but FOUR chemical elements: ytterbium, yttrium, erbium, and terbium
Posting at Slate, writer Sam Kean has been blogging his way through the elements of the Periodic Table leading up to the publication of his book on the subject, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. I especially liked his post about Ytterby’s contribution to the science of chemistry, through it’s unique geology, which offered up a number of rare-earth elements that were new to science in the 19th century.
He’s still working his way through the table. Today’s post is about Bismuth, which you and I know best for its use in the stomach remedy Pepto-Bismol.
Apparently, the latest one is the NPR-logoed reusable grocery bag, supplanting what seemed like an endless parade of tote bags, coffee mugs, and Garrison Keillor cassette tapes. Even though I officially stopped listening to NPR on a regular basis almost five years ago, I recognize each and every one of these stratagems as used by the various NPR stations I have known and loved over the years. I used to be a pretty consistent donator, especially once we settled here in Massachusetts and listening to NPR became an integral part of my daily commuting ritual. Now, I can hardly stand to listen to anything they have to say because the “NPR Style” of production is so smarmy and self-important. I also stopped watching public television for the most part. While PBS is much less obnoxious than NPR, the pledge breaks make me want to tear my eyes out of their sockets. Pledge breaks are the REAL reason for TiVo, my friends, not commercials.
I don’t donate to public broadcasting any more, and, I hate to say it, I more or less agree with the conservatives who say the government shouldn’t subsidize it anymore. I don’t agree with them about their desire to choke it dead or their unrelenting ignoramus act over the “liberal” content, I just feel that public television in particular is an idea that has come and gone, and that there would be ways to support an NPR-like entity commercially without having to bribe people with “Car Talk” CDs and more effing totebags. I suppose that’s nothing shy of heresy among my SNAGgy liberal compadres, but there you have it.
All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors
Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress