Blogs : Food Media
Food Media 
CHOW's roundup of food-related news from blogs, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and film.
Has Sugar Met Its Match?
Nearly 300 times sweeter than sugar, rebaudioside-A (derived from the plant stevia and sold as Truvía, PureVia, and Stevia Extract in the Raw) is assaulting the nation’s consumers with the alluring combination of natural origins and a comparatively low calorie content. A massive national rollout of stevia-sweetened beverages has begun, and baking applications are being frantically tested.
The one immediate sticking point? A licoricelike bite. The Chicago Tribune got the scoop, if you define “scoop” as “quote from the official spokeswoman.”
“‘Stevia has always had challenges in terms of its flavor profile,’ said Ann Clark Tucker, spokeswoman for Cargill, which produces Truvia. ‘That’s where it’s crucial to find the right plant variety [there are more than 200] and blend it with the natural flavors, which are the equivalent to salt and pepper in that they enhance or bring out the flavors’ characteristics.’”
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Tagged with: stevia, truvia, cargill, purevia, media, food and cooking, artificial sweetener
Boston Magazine Gets with the People
Best-restaurant lists are standard operating procedure for city mags like Boston Magazine. We all love lists, and it’s a no-brainer for the editorial team to decide to rank all the restaurants they’ve reviewed over the year.
This year, Boston Magazine did it a little differently: In addition to reviews from its staff and other traditional media, it used information from Yelp, Zagat, and Chowhound. Since Chowhound doesn’t have a star system, the magazine approached five Boston hounds and had them assign stars to each of the restaurants. Then Boston Magazine sent all the information off to a fancy statistician who did fancy statistician things to the data and spit back a list of the 50 best restaurants in Boston.
Is the everyman-reviewer now king? Maybe prince or at least duke—it turns out BoMag weighted its own reviews higher, but still, it’s not a top-down world anymore, with the editor sitting on high and pronouncing opinions to the hungry masses. As someone who has been humbled by Chowhounds, I love the idea that their expertise could eventually be elevated to be equal with a mainstream professional reviewer. Two of the magazine’s editors, Amy Traverso and Jolyon Helterman, even got involved in a Chowhound thread about the feature, explaining their process in quite some detail.
So is this a model that other media outlets will take on? What would the San Francisco Chronicle’s best dim sum feature look like if it had incorporated the thousands of opinions Chowhounds have on the subject?
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Tagged with: media, boston magazine, best restaurants, yelp, zagat, chowhound
San Francisco's Grilled Cheese Invitational
I can think of no better way to spend a Saturday than in the throes of fierce competition, especially when it involves viscous, melted cheese. The Grilled Cheese Invitational delivers on this front, providing an outlet for the creation of grilled cheese perfection en masse. Anything is game in this no-holds-barred match (except flame throwers, sadly), so I’m sure there’ll be some outlandish concoctions. “Can you grill like a butterfly and sting like a bee?” I’m not really sure what this means, but I hope to find out this weekend.
NorCal Regional Grilled Cheese Invitational, February 21, 2009, noon–5pm, Dolores Park, San Francisco.
If you don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are also grill-offs coming up in Austin and Los Angeles, with “more to come” in other places. Or you could host your own grilled cheese competition at home and challenge your friends.
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Tagged with: grilled cheese sandwich, grilled cheese invitational, food events, cook off, media, food and cooking
What Kind of Sicko Sells Candy to Children?
It’s hard not to love a public interest group that feels OK about comparing a company to a rogue nuclear power with a befouled human rights record for attempting to … wait for it … sell candy to children. The nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest is going after Topps CEO Michael Eisner for the company’s scurrilous Baby Bottle Pop, a “powdered candy sold in a miniature baby bottle, eaten by dipping a candy nipple in a sugary powder and licking it off.”
The real problem here: Topps is using a girl group called the Clique Girlz to sell said baby-themed candy to children, thereby … well, tempting children into eating candy. And, yes, licking simulated nipples.
“The first three ingredients listed on a Baby Bottle Pop obtained by CSPI are sugar, dextrose, and corn syrup or, in other words, sugar, sugar, and sugar,” says the press release, the text practically trembling with stern outrage.
“Topps is the North Korea of the food industry,” adds CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan. “They’ve isolated themselves from the community of responsible food marketers. They’re a rogue player that maintains the lowest standards of conduct.”
For context: Once, as a kid, I attempted to pack two entire pouches of grape Big League Chew into my mouth, and succeeded. What did I learn? The value of perseverance. Not once is this kind of candy-assisted-character-building experience mentioned by the CSPI.
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Tagged with: topps, michael eisner, cspi, candy, media
This Is Why You're Fat
The latest Internet meme to make the rounds—I’ve received it three times—is This is why you’re fat, a collection of photos of the fattiest, unhealthiest foods eaten by mankind. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Bacon Explosion Wellington and Corndog Pizza!
And it looks like everyone else is receiving it too. Serious Eats has had to tell people, “OK, OK … You can stop sending us the link to This Is Why You’re Fat,” while Slashfood asks, “A commentary on the gluttony and greed of contemporary American society. Or just delicious?” Meanwhile, Chowhounds have been debating which dishes they actually want to eat.
But perhaps the funniest, in an are-they-serious kind of way is PETA Europe’s response to the site on their blog Fish and Chimps:
“Meat and dairy products are high in cholesterol and saturated fat, which cause havoc for your body and can lead to heart disease and eventually death. Not that we’re against making vegan versions of these meals! Let’s take the ‘Heart Attack Sandwich’ ... as an example. To eat it and not succumb to its name, you’ll need:
Fried Gardein ‘chicken’ style fillet
Redwood’s faux-bacon
Linda McCartney vegetarian sausage
A thin slab of fried tofu
A fried green tomato topped with Redwood’s dairy-free melting ‘Cheezly’
A toasted roll to stuff it all in
Served with a vegetable gravy dipping sauce”
Morally superior heart attack sandwich anyone?
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Tagged with: this is why you're fat, media, blog, junk food, gluttony, internet trend, serious eats, slashfood, chowhound
Wave Goodbye to Handi-Snacks Pudding Cups
Fond of Handi-Snacks Puddings or Kool-Aid Gels? Too bad. In a matter of months you won’t be able to find them on U.S. grocery story shelves. As the Associated Press reports, manufacturers like Campbell’s, Kraft, Sara Lee, and Heinz are pulling under-performing products from grocery store shelves and selling off lines.
Heinz, for instance, plans to dump 15–20 percent of its SKUs (stock keeping units, the unique identifier that every product has) over the next three years, while Procter & Gamble sold its Folgers coffee, Jif peanut butter, and Crisco oils and shortening brands to the J.M. Smucker Company.
The retrenching comes at the end of a decade-long grocery store “bubble” that saw thousands of new products introduced. The Associated Press writes that grocery store shelves are “straining with about 50 percent more products than 10 years ago, including new formulas, flavors, and sizes of existing lines.”
So if you’re a fan of blue ketchup, you’d better buy it while you can.
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Tagged with: products, food and cooking, media, recession
