CSBs

Dinner on Death Row. What would you have for your last meal? (Someone produced photographic essay of what real convicts ordered - mostly prosaic: dozen hot dogs and can coke; 2 packets Kellogg's frosted flakes)

Men are more bread people, because bread is straightforward: it either works or it doesn't. A failed cake, on the other hand, can be veiled in layers of butter cream and fancy decoration, and is thus very female.

(On Facebook, KFC! just follows the 5 spice girls and 6 random guys named Herb)

QUOTATIONS

Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.W. Somerset Maugham

I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? ~Bill Bryson

Great food is like great sex. The more you have the more you want.

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.

It's better to light one candle than to have to clean a whole room

If we are what we eat, I'm easy fast and cheap

If we're not supposed to eat animals, how come they're made of meat?

Seize the moment - think of all those women on the Titanic who waved away the dessert trolley

Billy Connolly reckoned only thing you needed to know about formal dinner parties was that the cutlery worked the same as foreplay; you start on the outside and work your way in

No point in farming in Britain anymore bc the working class just wants to eat fat and the middle class only wants stuff grown in Tuscany.(Jeremy Clarkson)

Quotes about Food

ANECDOTES

Diamond Jim Brady reckoned to be greatest salesman 19th Century - he was of the "if you've got it, flaunt it" school - loved wearing ostentatious jewelry and liked his girlfriends encrusted too - most famous for his gluttony - owner of his favourite NY rest described him as his "best 25 customers" - always finished a meal with 2lb box chocolates - once visited the factory which couldn't fill an order he wanted so wrote $150,000 advance payment for construction of a bigger factory

Parmesan cheese, Canned soup, and Doritios have higher concentrations of MSG than Chinese food. Yet (some) people will complain they can't Chinese food because of MSG allergies while eating pizza, soups, and Doritios.

(At the Texas State Fair) People were queuing for an unusual delicacy: balls of butter, dipped in dough and cooked in a vat of boiling oil. Fried butter, in other words. The balls were dusted with a thin coat of powdered sugar. And if that's not enough, you can have it with cherry jam as well ...

Grand Scale Turducken: During Elizabeth I's reign, swan was a popular feast dish, especially when stuffed with the carcasses of 9 other birds.

"In my experience the [comments of the] organic food, antivaccine and homeopathy movements are unusually hateful and generally revolve around bizarre allegations that you covertly represent some financial or corporate interest. I do not; but I do think it reveals something about their own motives that they can only conceive of a person holding a position as a result of financial self-interest."

People buying huge numbers of cookbooks - possibly because people buy books about hobbies, and that's what cooking is - no longer a chore

Kitchen facilities increasingly for display - kitchen as theatre - Viking stoves now de rigeur, with twice heat of other stoves - but 75% never used

The average cook has 1000 recipes on file but ever only cooks about 35 of them

Anecdotes about Food

ARTICLES

Africa needs GM foods

Organic is a tax on stupid article

Eating horse meat

McDonalds burger should gain more credit for feeding so many people, so cheaply article

Greenpeace blocking golden rice article and article

What I really want for Christmas is a deep fat fryer. A friend lent us his neat, slimline one over the weekend and we had good fun playing with it. After a lot of experiment, my son and I produced proper, twice-cooked French fries that we thought were the match of any bistro chips. Even in Paris. Deep Fried

Using an extension cord, we set the toaster up a safe distance away from the house. I then inserted two Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tarts ("With Smucker's Real Fruit") and Steele, wearing thick gloves, held the toaster lever down so it couldn't pop up. After about two minutes the toaster started to make a desperate rattling sound, which is how toasters in the wild signal to the rest of the herd that they are in distress. A minute later the Pop-Tarts started smoking, and at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, scary flames began shooting up 20 to 30 inches out of both toaster slots. It was a dramatic moment, very similar to the one that occurred in the New Mexico desert nearly 50 years ago, when the awestruck atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project witnessed the massive blast that erupted from their first crude experimental snack pastry. Tarts Afire

More Articles on Food

BOOKS

Can say some nice things about BBs: may not have eliminated poverty, AIDS or nuclear weapons, but at least have made it possible to get a good cup of coffee anywhere in the world, and probably a good salad with balsamic and coriander. Balsamic Dreams

In America, shd avoid meals which need a lot of fresh ingredients to taste good, because outside of the very most expensive restaurants, they simply can't get stuff there in peak condition. Instead, go for meals put together using good-enough ingredients cooked in an interesting way.

Most top restaurants are in high rent areas, but most of the restaurants in high rent areas are not very good. TGI Fridays and Hard Rock Cafes survive by churning volume, not by providing quality.

The larger the number of restaurants serving the same ethnic cuisine in an area, the better the food is likely to be, because they are competing against each other and can't relax.

Suggests best way to improve American food and make it much cheaper would be to deregulate the food trucks and street vendors. Obviously enforce basic hygiene rules, but big advantage that let people experiment cheaply.

In an expensive restaurant, ask yourself "Which dish sounds least appetising" and order that. Simple logic: in a flash restaurant a menu item will only be there if it's good. If it sounds bad, it's probably especially good.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules For Everyday Foodies

The Nineteenth Century migrants to America disembarked opposite the Washington St market, full of fresh fruit veges and meat. And in the market was Smith and McNeill's restaurant. They kept no written records of any sort,paid all their bills COD, and at the end of each day settled up all their accounts and divided their profits. Appetite For America

Medieval banquets served all sorts of things no longer eaten - eagles, swans, swallows - not because they were tasty, but because better meat wasn't available. Beef, mutton, lamb rarely eaten because animals valued for their fleece or muscle. At Home

100 years ago, chicken dinner meant catching, killing, plucking and gutting a bird. Nobody does that today. And in another 100 years the cooking we do will seem quaint to our grandchildren.

American industrialized food corporations have convinced people to like foods that are not much better than field rations. Now mothers think nothing of buying frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for kids lunches. The feminists got men into the kitchen - but it wasn't their husbands, it was the food scientists at General Foods.

Justify using pre-cooked meals bc we're so time-constrained that we need help - but what do we do with the half hour saved?

We somehow find time to devote to computer and smart phone activities. But we eat while we do it - and because you can't chop onions and read your emails, you choose processed food that lets you multi-task.

And the reduction in 'time cost' has affected what we eat. A french fry used to be extremely time-consuming to prepare - peel and slice potato, cook it once, chill it then deep fry it. But now it is the most popular 'vegetable' in America, courtesy of the fast food industry. Cooked

there are things you need to do to make a restaurant work and they are nothing to do with a kitchen. You must live in a society where you have freedom of association, and of speech, where people are allowed to get together and talk about things. You must have streets that are safe at night. You need a system of transport that means you can get raw ingredients on a regular and predictable basis. When you complain that there are too many Starbucks in the world, you also have to say that the presence of a Starbucks indicates the presence of loads of other things as well. Restaurants are the great indicators of a growing and healthy society. AA Gill

The Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, a Western style saloon restaurant with a 25 foot neon cowboy standing guard. You get a free steak if you can eat it all - 72oz (just over 2 kgs)of sirloin plus a baked potato, salad, dinner roll and shrimp cocktail - in less than 60 minutes. You eat meal on a raised platform with rest of place watching, and now, on world-wide live webcam as well. A few people, such as Klondike Bill, a pro wrestler, have managed two of the steak dinners in an hour. But of the rest, only 8,000 out of 50,000 who have tried, have succeeded. Billy Connolly's Route 66

More Books about Food

LIMERICKS

A wonderful bird is the Pelican.
His beak can hold more than his belly can.
He can hold in his beak
Enough food for a week!
But I'll be darned if I know how the hellican

There was a young fellow named Fred
Adept at getting girls into bed
But by and large
He much preferred Marge
Because Marge was so easy to spread

More Limericks About Food

SONGS

"Yes, we have no bananas
We have-a no bananas today
We've string beans, and onions
Cabashes, and scallions,
And all sorts of fruit and say
We have an old fashioned tomato
A Long Island potato But yes, we have no bananas
We have no bananas today

More Songs About Food