Learning from the hunter-gatherers and other food and drink news

What the Hunter-Gatherers from ‘In Defense of Food’ Can Teach Us About Our Diets - At the heart of the new documentary based on Michael Pollan’s best-selling book is the story of a Tanzanian tribe that still eats the way it has for millennia.

The Year In Eggs: Everyone's Going Cage-Free, Except Supermarkets

The future is pinot, says wine expert and Taste of Tasmania keynote speaker Brian Schmidt - NOBEL Prize-winning astronomer and winemaker Brian Schmidt says Tasmania is Australia’s home of pinot noir and because of climate change may bec­ome the only region able to produce the wine. On Wednesday, Professor Schmidt will give the keynote add­ress at the Taste of Tasmania, a venue he says has some spectacular reds.

Why many restaurants actually don’t want you to order dessert

Use the sausage as a breakwater - does England make the world's most delicious breakfast? and other food and drink news

Does England make the world's most delicious breakfast? The English breakfast is a cholesterol-laden calorie bomb usually consisting of two eggs, sausage, bacon, baked beans, fried tomato and toast. It’s a symphony of deliciousness on a plate, enough to ward off the worst hangover and fill you up until dinnertime. ... As we waited, [food writer Lizzie] Mabbott let me in on her own personal fry-up rules. “Hotly contested is the brown-sauce-versus-tomato-sauce debate. I put brown sauce on the sausage and tomato sauce on anything that’s fried.” That wasn’t all, though. “I don’t like my egg yolk touching my tomato,” she said, adding, “and that’s not an uncommon complaint.” Mabbott is right: she’s not the only one with fry-up rules.

According to I’m Alan Partridge, the long-running BBC TV show featuring actor Steve Coogan, the eggs and beans should be separate when served. “I may want to mix them, but I want that to by my decision,” Coogan said on an episode in which his Russian girlfriend makes him a traditional English breakfast. “And use the sausage,” he added, “as a breakwater.”

It's Like Uber, But for Farmers' Markets - A startup called Farmigo is trying to create a better food system for both eaters and farmers

Startups seek meat alternatives for the masses - Patrick Brown is on an improbable mission: to make a meatless burger that Americans still love. Veggie patties have been around for decades, but Brown and others want to make foods without animal products that look, cook and taste like the real thing — and can finally appeal to the masses. “We are not making a veggie burger. We’re creating meat without using animals,” said Brown, a former Stanford scientist who has been scanning plants in search of compounds that can help recreate meat. Brown’s company, Impossible Foods, is part of a wave of startups aiming to wean Americans off foods like burgers and eggs. Their efforts are attracting tens of millions of dollars from investors. The goal is to lessen the dependence on livestock for food, which they say isn’t as healthy, affordable or environmentally friendly as plant-based alternatives.
Our Year in Meals - The New Yorker's  tables for Two correspondents revisit some of their most memorable meals of 2015.

Eating "Unclaimed Babies" and sweet acts of pseudo-cannibalism

Sweet success: Unravelling the Jelly Baby's dark past - As you pinch the last Jelly Baby out of the bag and sink your teeth into its plump little body, have you ever stopped to wonder if there's a method to your mastication madness. Do you, for instance, nibble away at its arms and legs until you are left with a helpless torso? Or are you the ruthless type that goes straight for the kill and chops off its head, Henry VIII-style? ... The process by which you eat these innocent-sounding sweets has probably never occurred to you, least of all struck you as bordering on the macabre. But this act of pseudo-cannibalism isn't the only disturbing chapter in the history of the much-loved jelly baby. Confectionery historians believe the earliest jelly baby was the work of an Austrian confectioner who worked for Fryers of Lancashire. It is thought that in 1864 he was asked to make a mould for jelly bears, but the resulting sweets looked more like newborn infants and were subsequently given the ghoulish name, Unclaimed Babies.

Italy's youth shun the Mediterranean diet - The fabled Mediterranean diet is at risk of dying out, according to a new study which claims just 33 percent of all young Italians are now eating according to tradition. The study, published in the journal Eating and Weight Disorders this month, revealed that less than half of all Italians now follow the Mediterranean diet, with only a third of those aged 15-24 conforming to the traditional and healthy way of eating. The famed Mediterranean diet is less a strict set of dishes and more a general nutritional model based around seasonal fresh fruit and vegetables, olive oil, pulses and seafood. But the study, carried out by scientists at Rome's University of Tor Vergata, suggests that these dishes are disappearing from Italian tables.

Is it a beer? Is it a wine? Marlborough craft wine to hit stores next year - Chili, chocolate and hop flavoured wines will be available in off-licence stores in February, thanks to a Marlborough wine company. Allan Scott Family Winemakers have been making craft wines, inspired by the experimentation of craft beer, since March this year. The first of these, the Green Hopped Gooseberry Bomb Sauvignon Blanc, combines Marlborough sauvignon blanc grapes with green sauvin hops from Nelson, while other varieties have added chili, coffee and chocolate.

The Year In Food: Artificial Out, Innovation In (And 2 More Trends)

Still life with entremets - Delicious depictions of antique feasts – and medieval displays at the table, including squirting fountains, mechanical swans and musicians bursting out of pies

NYC Jewish Delicatessens: The Ultimate Guide - Here's everything you need to know about New York's Jewish delicatessens, and the people that make them tick

First catch your jellyfish - the age of theoretical cookbooks and other food and drink news

First catch your jellyfish - As restaurant cuisine becomes ever more elaborate, so cookbooks have become increasingly theoretical - at least for us amateurs

A global glutton shares the 15 best things he ate in ’15

Chicken soup indeed good for colds - Stephen Rennard, a pulmonary expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaba, has found evidence that the soup, long enjoying the reputation as salvation for the sniffly, contains anti-inflammatory properties that may help prevent a cold's miserable side effects. In the lab, Rennard found that some ingredient in the chicken soup, dubbed the Jewish penicillin, blocks or slows the amount of white blood cells gathering in the virus-infected area in an inflammatory response to a cold, possibly relieving the development of cold symptoms. But he could not pin down the specific biologically active material.

Minimum alcohol pricing plan 'may breach EU law' - A European court has said the Scottish government's case for a minimum unit price for alcohol is contrary to EU law if other tax options exist. The European Court of Justice ruling instead recommends the introduction of alternative tax measures. The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon have both welcomed the ruling. The legislation to bring in a minimum price of 50p per unit was passed by the Scottish Parliament in May 2012.

Oberlin’s Food Isn’t “Cultural Appropriation.” That Doesn’t Mean the Students Are Wrong. - The case of ciabatta-based bánh mì at Oberlin is a telling example. Making bánh mì with ciabatta instead of baguette is blasphemous, because it was the French, not the Italians, who colonized Vietnam from the 1870s to the 1950s. The Vietnamese appropriated the French baguette, but made it with rice flour in addition to wheat flour; then they added Vietnamese ingredients (cilantro, pickled carrots) to the French-influenced sandwich along with pâté. Thus, a bánh mì with the wrong bread and a mayo-based coleslaw instead of fresh herbs and pickled vegetables is no bánh mì at all, as Vietnamese students understand better than anyone. It is, rather, an inaccurate rendering, a bad translation of a dish that was itself a cultural appropriation of the most appropriate sort. Colonized groups are forced to do what they can with the cultural raw materials foisted upon them by colonizers, and the Vietnamese did this to create what is probably the world’s most perfect sandwich.

Academic proves that the bigger the wine glass the more you drink - and taller men wear longer trousers

Larger Wine Glasses Encourage More Drinking, Study Finds - University of Cambridge researchers found that wine sales were 9% higher when larger glasses were used

The Only Way to Save Your Beloved Bananas Might Be Genetic Engineering

How The Food Industry Helps Engineer Our Cravings

1 In 10 People Around The World Gets Sick From Food Every Year

Casella buys upmarket wine brand from McWilliam's - Griffith-based Casella Wines, maker of Australia's biggest selling wine, Yellow Tail, has accelerated its strategy of buying up wineries and brands in premium wine regions with the acquisition of Brand's Laira from McWilliam's Wines. The purchase by Casella comes a year after it snared Peter Lehmann Wines in the Barossa Valley in South Australia for $57 million as part of a plan to expand into higher-end wine brands, but retain the big-selling Yellow Tail commercial wine brand as the engine room of the operations.

How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster chocolate

And you complain about restaurants charging for bread and butter - in China one's charging for "clean air"

China: Diners charged 'air cleaning fee' - A restaurant in eastern China has been caught charging customers an "air cleaning fee" on top of their food bills. Diners at the eatery in Zhangjiagang city, Jiangsu Province, were charged one yuan ($0.15; 10p) each to cover the cost of purifying the air inside

Ayahuasca related art is created by all kinds of people who have taken ayahuasca once or more.
This one is by Paulo Jales is a designer and artist from Brazil who shared his stunning artwork withe Ayahuasca website.
For more of his work, check out his website.

America Is Getting Its First Legal Ayahuasca Church - Fed up with the daily office grind and just need to get away from it all? You can go on the hunt for coffee beans in Ethiopia, get drunk in the temples of Japan, or, if you want something closer to home, you can visit a David Bowie-blasting bourbon distillery in Kentucky. But if you really want to expand your mind, you can visit the last frontier of human consciousness in Elbe, Washington. Peruvian spiritual retreat Ayahuasca Healings has recently been granted church status in the United States, which would make it the first legal and “public” ayahuasca church in America, according to founders, and the it has chosen a 160-acre chunk of land in Elbe as ground zero for spiritual healing. For those unfamiliar with ayahuasca tea, it’s a brewed Amazonian plant mixture which contains one of nature’s most potent hallucinogens. It can induce intense, life-changing visions, but also violent episodes of vomiting. Indigenous cultures have been using ayahuasca for centuries as a way of cleansing the psyche of underlying spiritual problems. Increasingly, in the disorder-fixated West, ayahuasca is being used increasingly to deal with psychological issues like depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

If 2015 Was a Dessert, It Would Probably Be an Ice Cream Blizzard

To Go Green, Bars Try To Reuse Their Booze

This Generation Of Teens Is Drinking And Driving Less

Vegetables Under Glass: Greenhouses Could Bring Us Better Winter Produce

Forget those points - just concentrate on the words and other food and drink news

The problem with scoring wine - Whitey explains why he's given away his weekly wine review scores, concentrating instead on the value of his words.

French champagne house Taittinger to make English sparkling wine - Champagne Taittinger has bought land near Chilham, Kent where it plans to make wine in partnership with UK wine company Hatch Mansfield.

Battle over coveted Bordeaux wine classification comes to court - Three Saint Emilion chateaux take the governing body of French wine to court, saying they were unfairly demoted or ousted from Saint Emilion Grand Cru Classé rankings

Tannat Is the Ultimate Big Red Wine for Steak - Move over, Malbec, this little-known varietal from Uruguay demands a place at the table.

China, corruption, fine wine and other food and drink news

Quenching China’s Wine Market - The Chinese government helped unleash a thirst for fine wine, until a clampdown on corruption bottled up demand.
Battle of the sparkling wines: Champagne vs Prosecco - Prosecco has gained tremendous ground, as sales grew 36% over the year, while Champagne sales grew just 8%.

Despite the prosecco sales gains, however, Champagne still accounts for 20% of sparkling wine sales in the U.S. The Italian offering accounts for 14% of sales.

Rare steaks 'could put diners at risk of superbugs' - The head of a major Government review warns that consumers could contract superbugs from eating rare and undercooked meats, because of the rise of antibiotic use among animals

Review on antimicrobial resistance - Drug-resistant infections could kill an extra 10 million people across the world every year by 2050 if they are not tackled. By this date they could also cost the world around $100 trillion in lost output: more than the size of the current world economy, and roughly equivalent to the world losing the output of the UK economy every year, for 35 years. ... an overview of the use of antibiotics in animals and agriculture, and the role that manufacturing and use of antimicrobials play in bringing these into the wider environment ... calls for three interventions: First, a global target needs to be set to reduce use of antibiotics in food production and that we should reassess which antibiotics should be used in both animals and humans. Second, it recommends that there be minimum standards set to limit the release of active pharmaceutical ingredients during the manufacturing process. Finally, it proposes that there be improved surveillance to monitor the situation with respect to both these issues and to help to inform global standards and targets.

Small Kitchens, by Choice - The microkitchen, stocked with expensive blenders, elaborate coffee makers and professional-quality knives, suits digital workers who eat free at work or take their meals in homey but globally influenced restaurants in their apartment buildings.

Value wines take the gongs - price not the best guide

When it comes to buying wine, price is not always the best guide.

From behind the paywall of Sydney's Daily Telegraph this week:

And from a recent wine review in The Canberra Times by Chris Shanahan:

Jacob's Creek Classic Riesling 2015 $7.85–$12Humble Jacob's Creek often upstages more expensive wines in Australian wine shows. In the recent National Wine Show of Australia, for example, this riesling's cellar-mate, Classic Pinot Gris, topped the pinot gris class and won the trophy as the best "Dry white, other variety" in the show. Jacob's Classic Riesling, an even better wine on my scoresheet, captures the aromatic appeal and lime-like flavour intensity of this great variety – on a delicate, dry and beautifully refreshing palate. Winemaker Bernard Hickin attributes the quality largely to fruit sourcing from several of Australia's best riesling-growing regions.

Read more: http://www.goodfood.com.au/good-food/drink/wine-reviews-from-chris-shanahan-20151125-gl7jfg.html#ixzz3tXAgKPDB
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A restaurant guide that rates the quiet ones and other food and drink news

Shhh! Campaigners try to silence noisy Spanish restaurant diners - Spaniards are famously not the quietest of people. Walk past any bar and the chances are you’ll hear a reassuring din of loud chatting against a background of blaring television noise. But now one charity is encouraging restaurants to lower their noise levels in order to create a more pleasant atmosphere for diners, and also help improve conditions for the hard of hearing.

A restaurant guide with a difference - rating the quiet ones

"Without a doubt we have a problem with noise here in Spain," Svante Borjesson, director of the foundation Oír es Clave, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of people with hearing impairments, told The Local.

Japan bans French foie gras over bird flu fears - Japan has banned imports of foie gras from France following a bird flu outbreak in the Dordogne region of the country. Japan is the biggest importer of the controversial delicacy.

Binge drinking vs drinking every day: which is more damaging to your health?

Adam Sanderson moves to the Deanery; Blumenthal rumoured for Perth

High-Sodium Warnings Hit New York City Menus - A new sodium warning requirement goes into effect in New York City restaurants Tuesday: Diners who eat at chain restaurants will now see warnings on menus next to items that contain high levels of salt. From now on, the New York City Health Department says chain restaurants with 15 or more locations must display a salt shaker icon next to menu items or combo meals that contain 2,300 milligrams of sodium or more.

Acclaimed chef Hélène Darroze on choosing between London or Paris - She runs Michelin-starred kitchens in both cities — and is a single mother to two young daughters

Beer made from avocados 'proving popular' in Yallingup

This common farm pesticide could be damaging the lungs of young children - The research, published Thursday in the journal Thorax, finds that early exposure to organophosphates — a common class of pesticides — is associated with decreased lung function in children. While some past research has indicated such effects in adults, this study is the first to examine the association in children.

Kimchi and Arabic coffee in latest Unesco cultural list

LA's Top Restaurant Charts New Waters In Sustainable Seafood -  Called Dock to Dish, it's a restaurant-supported fishery that allows local fishermen to sell directly to local chefs. It's based on the model of community-supported agriculture, where members share the risks of food production by pre-buying weekly subscriptions. In this case, restaurants commit to buying local seafood from small-scale fishermen. The idea is to create a supply-based system, offering whatever is plentiful and in season.

Internet Food Culture Gives Rise To New 'Eatymology'

'We want beer': State Library of Queensland looking back at Brisbane's 1940 beer riots

Death By Coconut: A Story Of Food Obsession Gone Too Far

Restaurant menu planning

xkcd comments" If anyone tries this on you, the best reply is a deadpan "Oh yeah, that's a common potato chip flavor in Canada."

Note: Do your sense of humour a favour and check in on xkcd's website regularly

Tweeted advice for aspiring restaurant owners

You need a strong stomach for the highs and lows. #entrepreneur https://t.co/XVQVcCdDMp pic.twitter.com/5EiqMsHNTn

— Restaurants Lover (@RestaurantBlog4) December 4, 2015

The days of the banana are numbered and other food and drink news

The world’s favorite fruit is slowly but surely being driven to extinction - The virulent banana-killing disease that quietly stalked through East and Southeast Asia since the 1960s is now on a global conquest. Since 2013, the lethal fungus has jumped continents, ravaging crops in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia. It’s clear the strategies for containing the spread of Panama disease, as it’s known, aren’t working. And since the fungus can’t be killed, it’s likely only a matter of time before it lands in Latin America, where some more than three-fifths of the planet’s exported bananas are grown. In other words, the days of the iconic yellow fruit are numbered.

Israel Aims to Recreate Wine That Jesus and King David Drank

Number Of Beer Barrel Builders In England Are Declining - Cooperage is one of the oldest trades in Britain. The skills needed to make wooden beer barrels were introduced by the Romans. Now there's only one "Master Cooper" left in England.

The science in favor of coffee: Six key studies

Four key studies that link coffee to heart attacks and hypertension

The Death of the (old style) Barista?

Italy's prized pesto at risk as basil prices plunge - A key ingredient in the traditional Genovese pesto could disappear from Italian tables as plunging prices for a basil variety, cultivated in the Ligurian area of Pra', drive its producers out of business. ... The basil, which has been grown on the gently sloping hills around Genoa for centuries, is protected by an EU DOP label of origin, but currently sells for just €0.60 a bunch. Prices have been driven down by industrial competition from farmers growing other varieties for use in the cheap jars of inferior green pesto which feature on supermarket shelves across the world.

Turning Down The Heat When Cooking Meat May Reduce Cancer Risk

In search of the perfect sweetener - "I was intrigued when the team making a new series for BBC One, Tomorrow's Food, invited me to try the extract of an African fruit, called the miracle berry. Derived from a plant called Synsepalum dulcificum, it is unlike any artificial sugar I'd tried before - because it works not by making foods sweeter, but by making them taste sweeter. The so-called miracle berries contain a molecule called miraculin which binds to receptors on your tongue, changing their shape. This makes sour foods taste sweeter. One advantage of temporarily changing your taste buds, rather than the food itself, could be the effect this has on your gut bacteria."

The tea industry boss in love with the drink

Fine Brine From Appalachia: The Fancy Mountain Salt That Chefs Prize
How Long Can Florida's Citrus Industry Survive? - Citrus growers in Florida, California and Texas have contended with a variety of diseases and pests over the years. But none has posed the threat they now face with citrus greening. A tiny insect, the Asian psyllid, carries bacteria that ruin the fruit and eventually kills the tree. It's been nine years now since the disease was confirmed in Florida. It infects every part of the state and has led to a steady decline in orange, tangerine and grapefruit production. The USDA stunned Florida growers when it announced it was lowering its estimate of this year's orange crop to 74 million boxes. That would be Florida's smallest orange harvest in more than 50 years.

Report confirms Nestlé ties to slave labour - Swiss food giant Nestlé is vowing to stamp out any forced labour used in its supply chain in Thailand after a probe confirmed workers were toiling in slave-like conditions to catch and process fish for the company's products.