1. So much talk is going around about Marilyn Hagerty, the aging lady who somewhat positively reviewed an Olive Garden — lukewarmly, we say — and suddenly became a big Internet sensation/spectacle. She’s just a polite food critic for a small-town newspaper, smart enough to go right for the chicken Alfredo and then describe it with two nearly neutral adjectives [...]
1. Where would we be today without Ronald Reagan’s vicious chin and actor’s poise posting up in yesteryear’s White House? (Don’t answer that.) Probably without one of the most American holidays (barely) known to humankind is the real answer. More American than Presidents Day, more American than Apple Pie Day — National Frozen Foods Day, celebrated on March 6 and [...]
1. If you’re like us, prone to reading nutrition labels while browsing grocery aisles, checking sodium content and comparing grams of protein, chances are you notice whether a food product has that all-informative stats sticker and get upset when one doesn’t. It’s the mystery, the shuttered window that peeves, and this week the USDA pulled up the blinds on raw [...]
1. Obama’s Food Safety Modernization Act is slow out of the gate, as the President’s updates were scheduled to drop last month, and the likeliest reason for the delay (other than the million-and-one bureaucratic snags and red tape inherent to government policy making) is a little fly in the ointment: the Microbiological Data Program (MDP). This seldom discussed USDA [...]
1. In a decision that will most likely triple U.S. produce exports to Europe within three years, the USDA and the European Union agreed Wednesday to standardize their respective definitions of what makes fruits and vegetables “organic,” rendering regulatory semantics equivalent. Previously, this or that fertilizer used on this or that side of the ocean, and other small production issues [...]
1. The only reason to be up and at ‘em on a weekend morning is this: SF Weekly’s top 10 brunch spots in the city. So, I guess that’s actually 10 reasons. There’s the red flannel hash at Serpentine and the balsalmic fried eggs at Foreign Cinema, luring us out of our cozy hideouts and giving us a good excuse [...]
1. In what is being described as the last-ditch effort to remedy intensely pervasive alcoholism on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the Oglala Sioux Tribe filed a $500 million lawsuit Thursday against nine huge brewers, including all the familiar players (i.e., Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller, Molson, Pabst), and against four alcohol retailers situated in bordering Whiteclay, NE — a tiny [...]
Well, OJ is on trial again. Not that OJ… I’m talking about the citrus beverage I can’t start my day without. Serious Eats’ drink department has released the results of a blind taste test they performed on pulp-free orange juice brands. I can’t say they’re too far off from my personal preferences either: pulpy OJ is the preference, but if [...]
1. All it would take for the unsuspecting urban world to become one wicked, giant battleground (think 1986’s Rampage arcade) would be to conduct a series of experimental neon ooze + flashing light tests in a sheet-metal shack (à la TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze) with Jamie Oliver’s food-additive arch-nemesis — the infernal “pink slime” — pumped, overtime, [...]
1. Since 2009, and the release of an undercover cattle abuse video by the Humane Society, California had upheld a slaughterhouse law that seems, by our account, to make a whole lot of sense. The state law stipulated all livestock too weak or too ill to stand — not even walk, just stay standing — were to be immediately euthanized, [...]
