Perth's exploding small bar/restaurant scene and other food and drink news

Specialist small bar, restaurant scene explodes in Perth at expense of older-style venues - The appetite for good food in Perth has never been greater, with new venues opening up at a rapid rate and traditional venues being forced to adapt or die. In the 2013-14 financial year 86 new restaurants opened in Perth, up from 57 the financial year before and 41 in 2011-12. Many are offering a diverse range of foods and dining options which break the structure of traditional eating styles.

Darling Downs fined for false free range egg claims by Court and ACCC - Egg producer Darling Downs has been fined a quarter of a million dollars for labelling a product as "free range", when it came from hens that never stepped foot outside. The Federal Court has declared Queensland-based RL Adams, trading as Darling Downs Fresh Eggs, had engaged in misleading conduct and made misleading claims in regards to its "free range" egg lines.

Honey isn’t as healthy as we think

A Food Museum Grows In Brooklyn - How did we get vanilla flavor without a vanilla bean? Or chicken flavor made from all-vegetarian ingredients? Though humans have been enjoying the sensory pleasures of flavor since we first popped food into our mouths, the flavor industry itself is relatively new. And this modern business of manufacturing smell and taste will be the theme of the Museum of Food and Drink's first exhibit in a brick and mortar space of its very own: a "mini-museum" opening in Brooklyn on Oct. 28.

Mediterranean Diet With Extra Olive Oil May Lower Breast Cancer Risk

The Latest Scramble In The Egg Industry: McDonald's Is Going Cage-Free - The campaign to force America's farmers to change the way they handle their animals celebrated a victory this week. McDonald's USA announced that in the near future, it will no longer buy eggs from chickens that live in cages. Those cages are still the industry standard, and 90 percent of America's eggs come from chickens that live in them.

The FAO Food Price Index registered a sharp fall in August - The FAO Food Price Index averaged 155.7 points in August 2015, down 8.5 points (5.2 percent) from July, the sharpest monthly drop since December 2008. In addition to ample supplies, a number of other factors contributed to the decrease, including the slump in energy prices and concerns about China’s economic slowdown and its negative consequences on the global economy and financial markets. The decline affected all the commodities tracked by the index, except for meat, the prices of which remained generally steady.

Soaring food prices drive up inflation in China

1,000 Years Ago, Caffeinated Drinks Had Native Americans Buzzing - 1,000 years ago, Native Americans in the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest were getting their buzz on in landscapes where no obvious sources of caffeine grew, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yaupon growing in the wild in east Texas. This evergreen holly was once valuable to Native American tribes in the Southeastern U.S., which made a brew from its caffeinated leaves. The research shows that people in the arid region — who had no nearby sources of caffeine — not only made drinks from cacao, the seed that is used to make chocolate, but also brewed drinks from the leaves and twigs of yaupon holly. That suggests that they had developed pretty extensive networks to trade caffeinated products between 750 and 1400 AD.