Tag: food

El Paso No-vending zones get Defeated

Food Truck venders have been battling for their rights to sell people food they want to buy lately, which is a total abuse of government power. I’ve been hearing about the struggle here in California for a few years. Big Government even went as far as to ban new fast food restaurants from opening in South LA (sorry economy. sorry Los Angeles unemployment rate, including the 20% of LA’s black community that has not worked in the past year. You don’t have a say in the matter).

Now mobile venders in El Paso Texas have just won a big victory on this battlefield by getting a zoning restriction repealed after suing over their unconstitutional nature.

The reason the law wants to ban food trucks is to protect big businesses from small businesses. Insanity. Susie Diaz, EP of the Restaurant Association admitted on camera “We wanted this ordinance in place to help established restaurants keep their business”.

The Institute for Justice explained the fight in January:

Practiced since ancient times, street vending is more popular than ever. The Economist magazine predicted that in 2011 “some of the best food Americans eat may come from a food truck.” Vendors are the darlings of many food critics, and they even have their own reality show on the Food Network.

But El Paso, Texas, has recently made it illegal for mobile food vendors to operate within 1,000-feet of any restaurant, convenience store, or grocer. The city even prohibits vendors from parking to await customers, which forces vendors to constantly drive around town until a customer successfully flags them down–and then be on the move again as soon as the customer walks away.

Thus, while people across the country embrace mobile vendors for the vitality and creativity they bring to a local restaurant scene, El Paso has decided to threaten vendors with thousands of dollars in fines and effectively run them out of town. El Paso’s No-Vending Zone scheme is in place for one reason: to protect brick-and-mortar restaurants from honest competition. But economic protectionism is not a valid use of government power.

No Car? No Supermarket? Kindov a problem

A 2009 study by the Department of Agriculture found that 2.3 million households do not have access to a car and live more than a mile from a supermarket. Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these “food deserts,” where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away. This map colors each county in America by the percentage of households in food deserts, according to the USDA’s definition. Data is not available for Alaska and Hawaii.

(via Slate Labs – Food Deserts: An interactive map)

Why High fructose corn syrup is icky

This article on Yahoo!

1. The process of making high fructose corn syrup is pretty weird

Weird? Who the hell cares what’s “weird”. Giving birth is weird. doesn’t mean no one should do it (just most people). What they mean is that it’s “weird” in the classic sense, meaning “not natural”:

The process starts off with corn kernels, yes, but then that corn is spun at a high velocity and combined with three other enzymes: alpha-amylase, glucoamylase, and xylose isomerase, so that it forms a thick syrup that’s way sweeter than sugar and super cheap to produce.

2. High fructose corn syrup does weird stuff to your body

This one is a better play, but unfortunately kindov means “dont eat anything ever” since it’s in everything.

The syrup interferes with the body’s metabolism so that a person can’t stop eating. It’s truly hard to control cravings because high fructose corn syrup slows down the secretion of leptin in the body. Leptin is a crucial hormone in the body that tells you that you’re full and to stop eating.

That’s why it’s so closely associated with obesity in this country. It’s like an addictive drug.

3. There might be mercury in your corn syrup

Yikes dude….

“We went and looked at supermarket samples where high fructose corn syrup was the first or second ingredient on the label,” Dr. David Wallinga, a food safety researcher and activist at the nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said. These 55 different foods included barbecue sauce, jam, yogurt, and chocolate syrup. “We found about one out of three had mercury above the detection limit,” Wallinga said.

4. The environmental impact of high fructose corn syrup is huge

Yawn. don’t care. not true in the real sense, only in the “limited scope of hippie humans” sense. Weakest one in the list.

McDonalds food is the new Styrofoam

This story is getting a lot of traction lately and I think it’s unfair since it’s not news. Morgan Spurlock already did this and included it in the special features of his documentary Super Size Me.

But whatever: McDonalds Happy Meal burger and fires doesn’t decompose. This chick Sally Davies bought the meal on April 10 of this year “with the express intention of leaving it out to see how it fared” Davies told the Daily Mail.

She told the Daily Mail that after the second day she had the Happy Meal in her home, “[M]y dogs stopped circling the shelf it was sitting on trying to see what was up there.”


vs.

The pictures are here. Wheeler @ DammitWheeler.com wanted to add this rebuttal:

this is bullshit. i have eaten pizza that was weeks old. food left out dries out and wont typically grow mold. another hippie trying to bring down the man. get a real job you old bitch (referencing the artist).

The more processed it is, the more it will likely just dry out and go stale, so its yes&no on the bullshit level.

Yes it’s bullshit cuz they’re implying that it’s like plastic (or like my headline says, Styrofoam) and will just sit in your stomach for a million years like the old chewing gum myth and that’s obviously not true. The food is just dried out and cardboardish like a rice cake. No one would keep a rice cake around for 6 months and claim it is shocking and gross that it hasn’t changed.

No it’s not bullshit though because pure food should mold. These apples should be rotted, a home made pizza should be moldy and a burger should smell terrible with its bun and fries covered in a blue and white Cruella DeVille outfit of fuzz. Yes, sometimes food doesn’t hold the ingredients necessary to foster bacteria in a way that makes it rot but bread and sliced fried potatoes and definitely ground beef should not be in that category.

Spurlock did his test as a REAL experiment: with a control group. He bought a mom and pop restaurant burger and fries and kept them around too and they decomposed naturally while the Mickey’s food looked just like the pictures on this Flickr album…

Why exactly is too much salt bad for you?

I put salt on everything. Even things im not going to eat. even things that arent edible. I’ll salt my remote control sometimes just out of habit. Literally every food item either needs or will benefit from the addition of salt except beverages. I’m always told how bad salt is for you, though its never explained exactly why. Today a Facebook friend came to the rescue with this status update explaining what too much salt does to you and why its not good in a short and easy to understand way:

But what happens when you eat more salt than your body needs? Your body retains fluid simply to dilute the extra sodium in your bloodstream. This raises blood volume, forcing your heart to work harder; at the same time, it makes veins and arteries constrict. The combination raises blood pressure.

A commenter added:

Sodium Chloride and (grey) Celtic Sea Salt act totally different in the body, The Sea Salt has 80 total minerals, all vital to human cellular function..

and now we all know. and of course the government is going to fix it for us.

if you’ll excuse me, i have to go refill the salt shaker i keep in my room.

In the video: Robin Miller, Food Network host, tells Headline Health (a FoxNews.com internet show) her No. 1 goal when cooking with spices: its all about the flavor. doesn’t matter how good something is for you if you’re not going to eat it, she astutely observes. salt is the new buzz word on whats bad but its real easy to replace evidently.

“Salt eaters live longer” is something i’d like explored more… for kids too:

Deep fried carp eaten alive

As if “Deep fried carp” didn’t sound delicious enough: a chef in Taiwan is serving it alive, presumably so diners can race to see if they can kill it through loss of its flesh due to their consumption or just good ole traditionally asphyxiation.

I scoured the youtube comments on these videos to find some “stupid ignorant asian assholes!” type rants and came up with nothin. interesting considering when I posted a video of me humanely (as quick as i possibly could, taking no relish in it) decapitating a rattle snake in my yard, I got over 100 “stupid ignorant American asshole” type comments. hmmm…

Oh wait, perfectly logical explanation for that right here: you can’t criticize non-white cultures:

It is not the first time that the Chinese have been criticised for their extreme eating habits.

Reports have claimed some restaurants offer monkey’s brains. Other dishes include rats, dogs, snakes, lizards and baby mice.

Last month Stephen Fry was criticised by the Chinese embassy after he singled out the Chinese culture as being the biggest threat to some endangered species.

“It is not very pleasant for us to single out a culture, but, if you care about lions and tigers and whales and sharks, it is the Far East and the way they eat, or the way they attempt to cure themselves, that seems to be the biggest threat,” he said.

A spokesman at the Chinese embassy responded: “I don’t think it is fair to accuse other cultures of having certain negative habits and traditions.

“We have our traditions, as the Spanish have bullfighting, and you, until recently, had foxhunting. We did not criticise you or the Spanish for this. Tiger bones for traditional medicine are now banned, to the suffering of the Chinese industry.”

Good point. eating an animal alive is exactly the same as killing it for sport. or something.

KFC testing sandwich using fried chicken as “bread”

The LA Times had similar thoughts to mine when first hearing of this on the Consumerist website, as I did, saying We were dubious when we first read that Kentucky Fried Chicken was coming out with a new sandwich that does away with the bread in favor of two fried fillets. And that the “sandwich” part of the sandwich involved was made of cheese, something called Colonel’s sauce .. and bacon? – But, after the initial omg-factor, I don’t see what the big deal is, health-wise.

Yes, it’s funny that KFC has a sandwich, in limited release or not, that contains bacon and cheese (not renowned for being health food) and uses fried chicken as “bread” but I’m still left saying “and?…” Chyea, fried chicken is fried. And the nutrient-less flour patty that constitutes fast food “bread” is any better than this “bread”? I don’t think so.

In the video below, Willy Geist places the KFC Double Down in a lineup of actual food atrocities, including my arch nemesis, the stuffed crust…

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Morbidly obese Ohioans starving on food stamps

“For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach” is the title of a recent NPR topical personalized report. Not because people in Ohio are getting shorter, but because they don’t have a job and are suffering the squeezes of a tight budget.

“The Nunez’s van broke down last fall” begins the sob story. Now, Gloria Nunez’s 19-year-old daughter has no reliable transportation out of their subsidized housing complex in Fostoria, 40 miles south of Toledo, to look for a job.

Nunez and most of her siblings and their spouses are unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps, says NPR. “Some have part-time jobs, but working is made more difficult with no car or public transportation” they report, which doesn’t sound quite right in the context of the full story which is an attack on the state of the economy.

Nunez, 40, has never worked and has no high school degree. She says a car accident 17 years ago left her depressed and disabled, incapable of getting a job. Instead, she and her daughter, Angelica Hernandez, survive on a $637 Social Security check and $102 in food stamps.

NPR does’nt say if the reason 19 year old Hernandez has a different last name than her mother because she is married to some bum who can’t support her already or what, so who knows, but this part of the report is… interesting:

People tell Nunez her daughter could get more money in public assistance if she had a child.

“A lot of people have told me, ‘Why don’t your daughter have a kid?'”

Continue reading Morbidly obese Ohioans starving on food stamps

AOL Food review: McDonalds Mushroom Swiss burger is evil between a bun

AOL Food lays the slamdangle down on McDonald’s Third Pounder Angus Mushroom and Swiss today.

Grade: F
Our food editor’s husband proclaimed that he’d just had the worst burger in all the land, so naturally, we had no choice but to sample for ourselves. Turns out he was wrong. It was in fact the absolute, most extremely, terribly, awfully horrible burger in the known universe.

The industrial mushrooms had the flavor and mouth appeal of a sneaker insole, while earwaxen Swiss cheese and globbed-on mayo formed a thick slick which was, truth be told, necessary in order to moisten the throat sufficiently to swallow the spongy gray mass that was being hawked as an Angus patty.

Bad things happen when McD’s tries to get schmancy, and they beefed this one badly.

I don’t eat no mushrooms on no burgers and swiss doesn’t go on meat (or, eh, anything), so I’ve never tried it, but dang…