Food News Feed

Globalization of food can be positive. It brought coffee and olive oil to the United States. But protecting species where they originate preserves genetic diversity; every region has particular foods that grow best in that climate...wild rice nation in the upper Midwest, and clambake nation along the Atlantic seaboard. Cornbread nation? That's a construct of the RAFT coalition (Renewing America's Food Traditions), which came up with a map of North America based on food traditions.
Related: The top ten endangered foods in the U.S. - see the The RAFT list.

Small groups linked to the extreme right are ladling pork soup to France's homeless. Critics and some officials denounce the charity as discriminatory: because it contains pork, the soup is off-limits for Muslims. Critics view the stew - dubbed "identity soup" by its cooks - as a cynical far-right ploy to penetrate the most vulnerable level of society while masking their intentions as humanitarian.

Omega-3 fatty acids "definitely have health benefits, but they are not a panacea. Preventing cancer is not one of the things omega-3 fatty acids do," said lead researcher Dr. Catherine MacLean, a natural scientist at Rand Health and a rheumatologist at the Greater Los Angeles VA Healthcare System. {You mean I've been eating all that farmed salmon for nothing...?}

A Japanese inventor claims to have perfected a machine that can transform a bottle of just-fermented Beaujolais Nouveau into a fine, mellow wine in seconds, all by zapping it with a few volts of electricity. "We can now electrolyze young wine and ship bottles of fine wine out in no time at all," declared Tanaka, president of Japanese startup Innovative Design and Technology, which runs a small laboratory in Hamamatsu, west of Tokyo.

Our food choices have changed greatly in the last decade or so. Remember when making a salad meant breaking out the iceberg lettuce? Or when brewing coffee involved nothing more than stirring some powder into hot water? These days, it's commonly recognized that an iceberg salad is far less nutritious than a host of alternatives - romaine, spinach, arugula. And the less said about the taste of instant coffee the better.

A Turkish kumpir is a baked potato with all kinds of far-out trimmings, like corn, peas, green olives, pickles, butter, monterey jack cheese, ketchup and mayo, hot dogs, chicken and a dollop of potato salad made from most of the ingredients named above. Kumpir is huge in Istanbul. It apparently became a popular street food about 15 years ago after arriving from either Albania or the former Yugoslavia, depending on whom you ask.