Get a load of this delicious video of a beekeeper slicing that honeycomb down, from which to extract this year's honey harvest. Read the rest

Great Big Story went to Tokyo to visit five small restaurants that make different kinds of popular street foods: takoyaki (pieces of octopus in griddle-cooked balls of dough, yakisoba (fried noodles, meat, and vegetables), gyoza (Chinese dumplings), okonomiyaki (crepes with noodles, cabbage, pork, and egg), and taiyaki (fish-shaped pancakes with sweet fillings). My mouth was watering as I watched this.

Image: Great Big Story/YouTube Read the rest

Taylor Jackson challenged himself to photograph cheap pre-packaged frozen dinners so the look like a fancy food photo of a dish from a posh restaurant. To get it done, he sought the help of a professional chef pal who is a master at plating. From PetaPixel:

The actual shooting starts around the 14 minutes mark (in the video below), if you want to skip straight to that to see how Jackson made this shoot work using only one camera (Nikon Z6) and one lens (NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.8S). No macro lens. No artificial light. None of those crazy food photography tricks we’ve all heard about.

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$3 TV Dinner Challenge! Yesterday @liamgoodvisuals and I challenged @the_nomad_chef to plate TV Dinners to look like 5 star meals. Full video out Monday. Until then - left is a Swanson’s Salisbury Steak, middle is a no name fettuccine alfredo, and the right is a Korean Beef Bowl. Shot on a Nikon Z6 with the 35mm S. #cheflife #nikon #nikonz6 #foodphotography #foodstagram #foody

A post shared by 📷 Taylor Jackson (@taylorjackson) on Jul 18, 2019 at 6:19am PDT

Ten years ago, we showed you a method for baking cookies on your car dashboard on hot days while you're at work, filling your car with delicious baking smells and a tray of warm cookies for the commute home. Read the rest

A family-run restaurant in Bangkok has had a the same giant pot of soup simmering for 45 years. When it runs low, they top it off.

From Great Big Story:

It’s a beef noodle soup called neua tuna. It simmers in a giant pot. Fresh meat like raw sliced beef, tripe and other organs is added daily. But any broth leftover is preserved at the end of each day and used in the next day’s soup. It’s an ancient cooking method that gives the soup a unique flavor and aroma.

Image: YouTube/Great Big Story Read the rest

FDA (totally not in thrall to Big Dairy): we're going to ban calling almond milk "milk"; Missouri State legislature (totally not in thrall to Big Ag): hold my beer. Read the rest

A simple but effective tip for a better burger, from Boing Boing buddy Gareth Brawnyn's excellent "Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales" e-newsletter:

Here’s a life-thing that you need to know about, especially before this weekend’s cookouts. How often do you get a restaurant burger, or grill one yourself, and before you’re finished horking it down, the soggy bun has lost the will to live and has disintegrated in your hands? Here’s the fix for your fixins. Don’t place the meat directly on the bun or the condiments on top of the lettuce. Place lettuce between the meat and the bun and between the condiments and the bun. No more soggy burger.

GrubHub is buying up thousands of restaurant web addresses, and “also appears to publish shadow pages without owners' consent—sometimes in direct competition with real websites,” reports The New Food Economy.

Why would the app-based restaurant delivery service do such a crazy thing?

It looks like the reason may be -- shocking, I know! -- predatory greed. Read the rest

Bon Appetit's 20-tip roundup of salad-making tips is full of culinary wisdom, from the mechanical (how to use a salad-spinner properly and how to apply dressing for a good, even coat that doesn't turn delicates to mush) to the chemical (using salt to tenderize raw cabbage) to the culinary (toast your nuts, put chopped veg in your dressing, mix your vinegars). It's a great and timely piece for anyone getting ready to enjoy the summer's garden veg or anyone trying to get kids to eat more veggies. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Kraft has launched "Salad Frosting" as part of a jokey marketing campaign about the lies that parents tell their kids. Because, y'know, deceit is funny and those kids who already like ranch dressing will be too dumb to recognize that this is the same thing while those who can't stand the stuff will suddenly develop a taste for it because of the "fun" packaging. From the press release:

“Innocent lies parents tell their kids help alleviate the pressures of everyday parenting, and if it gets kids to eat their greens, so be it,” says Sergio Eleuterio Head of Marketing for Kraft, “Simple innocent lies are not only part of parenthood, but a true tactic used by parents everywhere. Kraft Salad 'Frosting' is one lie you won’t feel bad telling your kids.”

According to a recent study, Ranch dressing is the most popular dressing in the United States*** and kids will eat anything with frosting, right? It’s a match made for dinnertime bliss. Now, convincing children to eat salad, broccoli and carrots may be a whole lot easier. Just add Kraft Salad “Frosting.”

Read the rest

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) is a nonprofit that kicked off its mysterious existence by filing a string of lawsuits against restaurant chains and coffee roasters for not posting California Proposition 65 notices (the notices are mandatory warnings about the presence of "chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and reproductive toxicity") despite the disputed science behind their demands. Read the rest

Just look at it.

(Thanks, Seth!) Read the rest

“Combining the public humiliation of racists and one of nature’s most delicious frosty treats is pure poetry in motion,” writes Kim Kelly at VICE's Munchies, where we also read a disclaimer we'd like to pass on to you: “For legal reasons, we must mention that throwing milkshakes qualifies as assault in some jurisdictions.” Read the rest

California bans eating roadkill in part because it's viewed as a temptation for poachers to disguise their kills as road accidents; but that means a lot of game goes to waste (at least 20,000 deer alone are hit by Californians every year -- some researchers put the number at 80,000), and the animals involved are left to die slow deaths by the roadside. Read the rest

CBD-infused snacks could soon join the product line that includes Chips Ahoy cookies, Cadbury chocolate, and Nutter Butter cookies. Read the rest

Christina Ward has a new book out called American Advertising Cookbooks: How corporations taught us to love Spam, bananas, and Jell-O. It's beautifully designed book with lots of color photographs from mid-century food corporation cookbooks that takes a deep dive into the sociological and geopolitical implications of American eating in decades past.

Here's an excerpt (PDF): Good Housewife photo section from American Advertising Cookbooks Ward for boingBoing

Background image: By dexterous simpson/Shutterstock Read the rest

Let's talk about the French Laundry's bong course. https://t.co/cSdEvoydR0 pic.twitter.com/G80R4u06Wm

— Paolo Lucchesi (@lucchesi) March 26, 2019

In a New York Times review of celebrity chef Thomas Keller's Manhattan eatery Per Se, critic Pete Wells described the mushroom soup "as murky and appealing as bong water." So now for special guests, Keller's legendary French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley serves their porcini mushroom broth out of a blue and green swirl glass bong. From a column by San Francisco Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho:

After dinner, I emailed the French Laundry’s public relations people about the bong. In an email, they responded that it’s something Thomas Keller pulls out for restaurant industry folks because he knows we’d get a kick out of it. (This is true. And Keller knows me from a previous encounter during my past life as a New Orleanian line cook.)

“It is clearly a tongue-in-cheek reference to past writing and is not on the menu,” they wrote, “but regularly prepared for guests as a fun item.” When I pressed them on where the bong was actually from — obviously not Riedel or Zalto — all they would say was that it was “hand blown by an artisan.”

"The French Laundry’s bong course is a brilliant act of artistry" (SF Chronicle) Read the rest