1. Frozen-yogurt company Pinkberry’s co-founder, former kickboxer, and architect Young Lee was arrested at LAX Monday night on a warrant for serious assault allegations. Last summer, Lee was driving around Los Angeles when he suddenly became offended by a transient’s supposedly sexually explicit tattoo, exited his vehicle, and insisted the man kneel and apologize (which the man did). Despite acquiescence to the degrading classist demands, Lee proceeded to chase the victim and bludgeon him with a tire iron, as if his martial arts training wouldn’t have sufficed to miraculously remove the man’s tattoo or to accomplish whatever it was he’d hoped to achieve by viciously beating somebody down. It’s very unlikely Mr. Lee won’t be swallowing a big helping of prison time.
2. Bodybuilders and Little Miss Muffet aren’t the only ones to come up with a use for that unsettling dairy liquid known as whey. This week, German scientists unveiled that they can produce sheets of a substance resembling plastic by heating and then spraying the protein and lactose cheese byproduct onto flat surfaces, lastly allowing the denatured whey to dry into pliable films. The innovation puts waste to work, and may soon end up as common food-container preservative sealing.
3. What’s it called when you get busted for something you wouldn’t have gotten busted for if you hadn’t first been busted for something else? Icing on the cake? Insult to injury? Tough luck? Well, Eric Jensen, owner and namesake of Colorado’s cantaloupe/listeria offender, Jensen Farms, was decked with an unrelated fine Thursday after the Department of Labor discovered Jensen, who also owns a motel, had been renting out unsafe, unsanitary, (often) unfurnished rooms to migrant workers. A little heavier than just icing or insult.
4. Chicago is about to test run a new food-safety inspection plan, approved by a City Council budget committee this week, that expects to facilitate field inspection by allowing restaurants with exemplary safety histories and low-risk vendors of prepackaged foods to obtain certification for self-inspection. If successful, the program would alleviate approximately 20% of the Chicago Department of Public Health’s workload.
5. Published January 13 in Science, a study points to evidence that manganese, a metal and trace mineral found in nuts and grains, could protect us from poisoning by E. coli toxins. Mice used in the testing were injected daily with manganese for five days prior to a lethal dose of Shinga toxin and lived to squeak the story.
6. Chances are you’ve heard, or perhaps may have guessed — down-home, deep-frying dame Paula Deen has Type II diabetes. Not only that, she’s known for years and just come out with the news on Tuesday’s Today Show. There are, fittingly, large pockets of sympathizers but also equal numbers of “told you sos” and folks suspicious about her timing, in part because of her concurrent announcement that she’ll now be spokeswoman for the diabetes drug Victoza. Anthony Bourdain had his usual bag of sunshine and realism to open up on the subject, justifying his staid stance by pointing to Deen’s irresponsible peddling of grease-laden butter bombs. At least give her some credit for suffering silently and for publicly trying to take the reins, however late in the game it may seem.
7. More celebrity chef news: famously foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsay is soon to kick off the new season of his restaurant-rehab show, Kitchen Nightmares, and casting calls have been officially extended this week. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to be berated, ridiculed, intermittently chummed up, ridiculed some more, and, finally, made over in a most watered down fashion?
8. If you weren’t born in Detroit, don’t live in Detroit, or have never been to Detroit, you were probably unaware that there’s Detroit-style pizza. There’s Chicago, New York, St. Louis, even Cleveland (yep) and Connecticut pizza. Indeed, the Motor City’s got a stake in the game, too: a thick pan pizza with a paradoxical mix of gummy dough and crispy, caramelized crust, cheese carpeting wall to wall. It’s truly a beautiful kind of pie, but its standout downfall is one shared by all rectangular Sicilian remakes — what to do about center slices? Ponder no more, for, this week, Serious Eats founder Adam Kuban has invented away the center slice. A solution in the labyrinthine form of a snaking pan. The vaguely W-shaped contraption provides everyone with at least two crunchy edges per piece. Brilliant.
9. This novelty item for foodie pictophiles combines the aesthetic appeal of Mexican grub and the practicality of gear protection in one spicy little ditty called the Photorito. Hazard a guess as to what this Tyvek camera-lens cloak resembles.
10. After five years of brainstorming, fine-tuning, and who knows what else, Taco Bell is rolling out of bed to do breakfast with a whole new menu dubbed First Meal. Sweeping the country next week will be such items as a Johnsonville-sausage and egg wrap, four types of breakfast burritos, hash brown patties, and fried Cinnabon balls. Looks like you’ll be rolling right back into bed.
Photo: yuchi6
