Potted Meat Museum

A new film, Me & Mickey D, is by a filmmaker who ate at McDonald’s for 30 days and lost weight.

NRO: Would you recommend anyone eat McDonald’s for 30 days?

Whaley: Actually I think a lot of people do, at least for a few meals a week. Tens of millions of people eat there every day without ill effect. As for a 30-day diet to lose weight? That’s up to the individual. This was not intended to promote a McDonald’s diet for losing weight, it was meant to demonstrate that some of our current belief systems are incorrect.
…
NRO: Besides the obvious, Super-Size-Me-is-wrong/be responsible/McDonald’s-can’t-make-you-fat,-only-the- choices-you-make-can message, what is the overall point of your documentary?

Whaley: Simply to encourage people to take more responsibility for their own lives and to appreciate the concept of freedom of choice that we have in the U.S. I also hope to inspire people to get out and move around more. Forget about ‘exercising,’ just get out there and celebrate your life by staying busy and productive. ‘Eat to live, don’t live to eat.’ – Moliere

I’ve excerpted the best bits, but feel free to read the full story

British potato farmers demonstrated outside Parliament on Monday to publicize their bid to remove the term ‘couch potato’ from the Oxford English Dictionary, arguing that the description of slothful TV addicts harms the vegetable’s image.

The group of about 30 farmers carried signs that read ‘couch potato out’ and ‘ban the term couch potato.’ A similar rally took place in Oxford, central England.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘couch potato’ as ‘a person who spends leisure time passively or idly sitting around, especially watching television or video tapes.’

The British Potato Council says the phrase makes the vegetable seem unhealthy. It wants the expression stripped from the dictionary and replaced in everyday speech with the term ‘couch slouch.’

‘The potato industry are fed up with the disservice that ‘couch potato’ does to our product when we have an inherently healthy product,’ said Kathryn Race, head of marketing at the British Potato Council, a body set up by the government to run advertising campaigns promoting potato consumption and research issues linked to the vegetable.

‘Potatoes have been around for many, many years, but increasingly, with all the coverage that dieting & healthy eating gets in general, we need to make sure that potatoes remain a popular food,’ Race said.”

It’s hard to tell how serious they are. The article makes them sound very serious. Perhaps if I lived in Britain I’d understand the tone a bit better. As a PR stunt, it’s brilliant. It will raise awareness or whatever. As a piece of consumer education, it’s obviously ridiculous. You can’t angrily protest to get people to stop thinking something or making an association. Genie is out of the bottle, right? I’m going to quietly hope it’s the former.

Campbell’s Seeds (in Japan) is produced by a third party, Tokyo-based World Flower Service. Inside is a choice of seeds to grow miniature tomatoes, miniature pumpkins or green peas. The idea of a more labor-intensive Campbell’s came to mind from an interior design magazine that showed the can immortalized by Andy Warhol being used to grow herbs in the kitchen.

Gorgeous new bakery on 9th ave in Manhattan, with an example of what I guess is a food trend – the Fwinkie, as they call it, an example of what a Twinkie would be if it was made by a baker and not a processed synthetic food shmechhghh company. They had regular, and chocolate (dipped in chocolate) – which is what this is. It was pretty good. Not freak-out good, but pretty good. Looked better than it tasted, I’d say.

The colloquial definition is absolutely Not Safe For Work (NSFW), but “Indeed, bukkake is more commonly used in Japan to describe a type of dish where the toppings are poured on top of noodles, as in bukkake-udon and bukkake-soba.”

I certainly was surprised to go to a noodle house in Mountain View recently (on Castro St. – some relatively new place) and see that on the menu, having only heard the term used in the pr0n sense. Imagine trying to explain your reaction to a dining companion who wasn’t familiar with the term!

The Egg Cream Racket is a richly detailed history of the Egg Cream. Empahsis on detailed. It’s a long piece. Nice implication that the thing of nostalgia may be more for its nostalgia than it was as an original artifact…

Unbalance is the celebrity restaurant owned by champion sumo wrestler Konishiki, who like his colleagues bulk up by eating chanko.

Ralston Foods makes a cereal called Crispy Hexagons.

while the same product name is used by Flavorite

and Schnuck’s

Originally spotted here.

The Worst Breakfast Ever.

I pressed one of the home fries’ middles with my finger, which led to it oozing out some kind of clear creme in a most grisly fashion. It couldn’t have just been water, because water never stained my kitchen countertop before. Little did I know — the worst was yet to come.