Food
Man Likes Chinese Food
This story about 64-year-old David Chan, a lawyer and account who has eaten in 6,297 Chinese restaurants during his travels, is delightful.
“What We Eat, How We Live and the Planet”
Modern Farmer, a new publication that makes “connections between what we eat, how we live and the planet, recently released their first issue, tackling everything from organic farming in China and the mango producer in Malawi that’s sending fruit to smoothie makers around the world.
Ordering Something for the Kitchen
Joseph Weisenthal had dinner at 715 in Kansas this weekend, and “>noticed that one of the items on the menu included buying the kitchen a six-pack for $12. This kind of thing isn’t unique to 715—restaurants everywhere do it, and some people wonder if it’s a nice thing or annoying thing to have on the menu.
Fried Dough Snobbery
Attractive people line up to pay $2.25 for a donut. Sometimes I do, too, usually whenever I walk by, because I always want doughnuts, every minute of every day.
Class, Food Stamps, and Goosefat Cheesecake
Over at the Guardian, Suzanne Moore offers up a bite-sized analysis of the nexus between food choice, class, celebrity chefs, and rising inequality in Britain.
Frugal Traveler’s Tasting Menu
So hungry right now.
Is Eating Local Good for Poor Farmers?
The choice between eating cheap supermarket food versus being a sustainable locavore is not really as simple as it looks, at least if your goal is to make the world a better place.
You might think that an all-organic, all-local diet would be best for the environment, for your health, and for an ethical world economy—but not always. Maybe not even most of the time.
Sometimes food from halfway around the world has a smaller carbon footprint than food produced locally. Many poor farmers are “organic” because they simply can’t afford fertilizers and pesticides—in which case they probably can’t afford the “organic” certification, either.
Add in the issue of farm subsidies and their negative effects on third-world farmers and things start to get really complicated.
So should people who shop exclusively at farmers markets feel even more guilty than they probably already do? Overthinkers will be happy to learn that there is no consensus, though pretty much everyone agrees we should ditch the Farm Bill. (Except for the people who get money from the Farm Bill, of course.)
B. Traven is a Billfold reader (guess which one of you!) who sends us so many tips, we just had to give him a byline. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The Taco That Created 15,000 Jobs
If you had asked me to make a wager on whether or not a taco made with a Doritos shell would be a wildly successful fast food item people would want to consume, I would have bet against it and lost.
