Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food

http://vimeo.com/64607150

Here's a clip from an upcoming documentary by a fourth grader who snuck a camera into school to document his horrible school lunches and the vast distance between the food that the school claims to serve and food he and his friends end up eating.

Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that reads as if it came from the finest restaurants. However, when Zachary gets to school, he finds a very different reality. Armed with a concealed video camera and a healthy dose of rebellious courage, Zachary embarks on a six month covert mission to collect video footage of his lunch and expose the truth about the City's school food service program.

Yuck: A 4th Grader's Short Documentary About School Lunch (via Reddit)

Abusive restaurateurs stage spectacular social media meltdown

Cory Doctorow at 2:14 pm • •

Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro is Scottsdale, AZ gained some small notoriety when it became the first restaurant that Gordon Ramsey gave up on in his show Kitchen Nightmares, in which the restaurateur helps failing businesses reform their ways. The Ramsey segments show the owners of the restaurant, Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, screaming obscenities at customers, taking servers' tips, and generally behaving very badly.

But that was just for warmup. After the episodes aired and showed up on YouTube, the Bouzaglos took to Facebook to condemn their critics on Reddit and Yelp with a mix of profanity, Bible-thumping, spurious legal threats, and, finally, a claim that it wasn't them at all, all the crazypants stuff had been the work of hackers who took over their Facebook account.

In a world with innumerable social media hissyfits and bun-fights, the Bouzaglos' meltdown stands out as a world-beater. Truly, this is an exceptional episode of bad behavior.

This is the Facebook page for Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.

First vatburger is ready to eat

Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am • •

After spending $250,000 worth of anonymously donated money, Mark Post from Maastricht University is ready to go public with his first vat-grown hamburger, which will be cooked and eaten at an event in London this week. Though they claim that it's healthier than regular meat, one question not answered in the article is the Omega 3/6 balance -- crappy, corn-fed, factory-farmed meet is full of Omega 6s and avoided by many eaters; the grass-fed, free-range stuff is higher in Omega 3s.

Yet growing meat in the laboratory has proved difficult and devilishly expensive. Dr. Post, who knows as much about the subject as anybody, has repeatedly postponed the hamburger cook-off, which was originally expected to take place in November. His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper.
But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous. Large-scale manufacturing of cultured meat that could sit side-by-side with conventional meat in a supermarket and compete with it in price is at the very least a long way off.“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”
There are also questions of safety — though Dr. Post and others say cultured meat should be as safe as, or safer than, conventional meat, and might even be made to be healthier — and of the consumer appeal of a product that may bear little resemblance to a thick, juicy steak.

Engineering the $325,000 Burger [Henry Fountain/New York Times]

(via /.)

Cake-topped parfait

Cory Doctorow at 12:23 pm • •

A chain of Osaka cafes sells a crazy parfait, topped with a ginormous piece of cake:

On a recent day out in Osaka, our reporter stopped by a café and ordered a truly hard-core parfait. It wasn’t that the parfait was so big, and no, it didn’t contain any shocking ingredients. What blew our minds about this parfait was its topping.
It was a slice of cake, and it was so big it wasn’t even trying to fit into the glass. Our reporter had this sweet-tasting tag-team at the Semba branch of Osaka-based café MIOR.

Who Needs a Cherry on Top? Osaka Café Crowns its Parfaits with Cake [Casey Baseel/RocketNews24]

(via Super Punch)

What happens when you forget pizzas in the oven for weeks

Cory Doctorow at 2:44 pm • •

A friend of redditor BigBoppinBill forgot some pizzas in the oven for "a few weeks." The result? A kind of glorious fungal jellyfish.

This calls to mind the timeless wisdom of the Jazz Butcher's classic, loony, over-the-top song, Caroline Wheeler's Birthday Present: "Do you know what happens when you leave a fish in an elevator?/You don't?/Well, here's a clue/Fish is biodegradable/THAT MEANS IT ROTS."

A friend of mine left two pizzas in his oven for a few weeks... (i.imgur.com) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Make bread by mixing ice cream with flour and baking

Cory Doctorow at 10:49 am • •

It appears that you can make delicious (and fantastically high-carb) bread by mixing melted ice-cream with self-rising flour and baking it. I'm willing to believe that this is totally yummy but I'm not going to try it:

1 Preheat oven to 350 F
2 Let ice cream soften at room temperature for 10-15 minutes.
< 3 In the bowl of your mixer combine ice cream with flour until the flour is incorporated.
4 Evenly distribute sprinkles in the bottom of a greased Bundt pan and scoop batter evenly on top.
5 Bake for 35 minutes until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
6 Invert and allow to cool completely.

Cake Batter Ice Cream Bread (via Neatorama)

How Tabasco Sauce is made

Cory Doctorow at 7:47 pm • •

I am a committed Tabasco Sauce fiend. It is neither too hot, nor too mild, nor too vinegary -- I put it on pretty much everything. I'd use it for contact lens solution if I could. My life was radically transformed by my discovery of tiny, individual Tabasco sachets that aviation security X-rays don't identify as liquids, which means I can carry Tabasco with me at all times without worrying about getting stopped at airports for not having a stupid baggie with my liquids in it.

I found this video describing the production of Tabasco absolutely riveting. The fermentation process, the salted barrels, and let us not forget le petit baton rouge.

How Its Made - Hot Sauce (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Bake a Mean Spirited Censorship Pie with the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow at 6:35 pm • •

EFF is celebrating the new inductees into its Takedown Hall of Shame with a new cooking show! In this episode, EFF staffer Parker Higgins bakes a "Mean Spirited Censorship Pie" -- which is what all have to call the classic Southern dessert formerly known as "Derby Pie," now that Kern's Kitchen in Louisville is threatening to sue anyone who posts a family recipe with that name.

It's sarcastic, carbtastic, and informative -- delicious!

Baking With EFF: (Not) Derby Pie, the Trademarked Treat

Evolution, pregnancy, and food —

The populations at lowest risk for developing gestational diabetes — namely, ladies of European decent — come from cultures that eat (and have eaten, for thousands of years) dairy and wheat-heavy diets that would, normally, increase your risk. Meanwhile, writes Carl Zimmer at The Loom, Bangladeshi women, who have one of the highest risks for gestational diabetes, come from a culture that traditionally ate a low-carb, low-sugar diet. What's going on here? The answer might lie in evolution. It's a particularly interesting read given the ongoing pop-culture debate about whether 10,000 years is enough time for humans to adapt to eating certain foods. This data on pregnant ladies would suggest the answer is, at least in some respects, yes. — Maggie •

Why do shark embryos eat one another? —

Tia Ghose: "[they] cannibalize their littermates in the womb, with the largest embryo eating all but one of its siblings. Now, researchers know why." — Rob •

Cell model cake

Cory Doctorow at 7:43 pm • •

Canadian artist/photographer NicoleWilliam created this cell model cake for her BIOL330 class in 2010. I hereby grant her a retrospective A+. It even comes apart!

Biology Cell Cake (via Geeks Are Sexy)

HOWTO make a DNA model out of licorice and jellybabies

Cory Doctorow at 9:35 am • •

What better way to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's landmark paper on the double helix structure of DNA than by making your own double-helix out of jellybabies and licorice? Dr Mark Lorch's method for making edible DNA models promises to capture the "elegant simplicity" of DNA.

You'll need:
Two long, flexible sweets, such as liquorice ribbons.
A few handfuls of soft, highly coloured sweets, such as jelly babies or marshmallows.
Cocktail sticks.

For advance bio-engineers, Lorch also explains how to extract the DNA from a kiwi fruit using things lying around your kitchen.

How to make a DNA double helix from jelly babies and liquorice [Dr Mark Lorch/Guardian]

(via Neatorama)

Freemasonry and the high echelons of French cuisine —

"There have long been whispers inside the French food world that all the top chefs are members of the Freemasons, and that membership can make or break careers," writes Bon Appétit. "The gossip can, of course, be malicious." — Rob •

Man has eaten at 6,297 Chinese restaurants in the USA and Canada

Cory Doctorow at 7:51 am • •

The LA Times tells the story of David Chan, a Chinese-American man who discovered a love of Chinese food as an adult, during a wave of Chinese immigration to America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He and his Hong Kong born officemates set out to sample all the new Chinese restaurants that opened after the 1965 loosening of the strictures on Chinese immigration to the USA, and he's kept meticulous records ever since, documenting the highs and lows of 6,297 Chinese restaurants across the USA and Canada (he's sampled the Chinese in all 50 states). These are now kept in a huge spreadsheet, with graphs and maps.

In New England, he encountered a chow mein sandwich topped with gravy. In St. Paul, Minn., he found a burger with egg foo young for a patty. Throughout the South, he came across a sweet, stir-fry dish called Honey Chicken.
"It doesn't have to be authentic Chinese. If it's Chinese American, it's all the more interesting," Chan said.
Chan rarely discussed his list. His son, Eric Chan, was only vaguely aware of it growing up. "There are a lot of things my dad doesn't talk about," he said.
In their family, a meal often said what words couldn't, Eric Chan said. During the three years he studied law at Stanford, his father visited about 20 times. They'd dine in San Francisco dim sum houses and San Jose noodle shops.
"If you collect enough of something, you can capture its essence," Eric Chan said. "Maybe that's what he's trying to do with food."
Chan rarely eats somewhere twice, but he keeps going back to ABC Seafood, even after the restaurant's ownership changed and, he said, the lemon chicken lost its flavor. Chan says he does it out of respect for history. He's dined at practically every Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, but few culinary experiences can match that first meal at ABC Seafood.
"For a good portion of when they were open, they were the best Chinese restaurant in the country," Chan said.

6,297 Chinese restaurants and hungry for more [Frank Shyong/LA Times] (via Digg)