The growing shortage of chefs and other food and drink news and views

The crippling problem restaurant-goers haven’t noticed but chefs are freaking out about - Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager.
Coffee: Do Italians do it better?
A Muscle Drug For Pigs Comes Out Of The Shadows - The USDA is allowing a pork retailer, for the first time, to label products as raised "without the use of ractopamine." It may lead to pressure on farmers to stop using the muscle-promoting drug.
The Art Of Drinking Absinthe, The Liquor Of Aesthetes
The science of skipping breakfast: How government nutritionists may have gotten it wrong  Researchers at a New York City hospital several years ago conducted a test of the widely accepted notion that skipping breakfast can make you fat. For some nutritionists, this idea is an article of faith. Indeed, it is enshrined in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government’s advice book, which recommends having breakfast every day because “not eating breakfast has been associated with excess body weight.” As with many nutrition tips, though, including some offered by the Dietary Guidelines, the tidbit about skipping breakfast is based on scientific speculation, not certainty, and indeed, it may be completely unfounded, as the experiment in New York indicated. At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was ... the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all. “In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight,” the researchers from Columbia University concluded in a paper published last year.
A study about butter, funded by the butter industry, found that butter is bad for you
Put An Herb In It: Lebanon's Fresh Approach To Beer And Cocktails