snackdown! - 2.5.10

with the super bowl only two days away, the snack world's been positively abuzz with article after article about which snacks you can use to spice up your super bowl party. basically, all the articles do is give some "unique" take on the same snacks people eat every year during the game--nachos, wings, pizza, etc. use turkey wings instead of chicken wings & smother them with dr pepper bbq sauce! make a pizza that's half colts-inspired & half saints-inspired! YAWN. i tell you, if i see another article featuring some cutesy super bowl recipe, i'm taking a hostage.

• wall street's taken quite a beating over the last few years, but that doesn't mean that the folks working there don't still know how to have a good time. last friday, a group of investment bankers at calyon decided to GET WILD by holding a chicken mcnugget eating challenge in which one dude attempted to eat sixty chicken mcnuggets in twenty minutes. since wall street peeps love playing with money, they started taking bets on his success & all told, there was $10K floating around. in the end, he finished all sixty nuggets in only fourteen minutes. his prize...$500, an amount that should cover about a fifth of his impending angioplasty. (animal ny)


• in kingsport, tennessee, two dudes had a serious craving for a bounty of snack cakes but no desire to pay for them. lucky for them, there were snack cake-filled trucks parked outside a kingsport bakery, so they made their way into one of the trucks to start filling up. unfortunately, an employee heard them & called the cops. when the cops arrived, they followed footprints in the snow leading up to one of the trucks & found both "$300 worth of hostess snacks - cupcakes, minimuffins, streusel cakes, twinkies, zingers and 100 calorie cakes - piled up beside it" & the two dudes hiding out underneath it. the best part about the article was the readers' comments, which was kicked off with the cautionary "if they aren't careful, their snack cake addiction can sno-ball into more serious problems." ha! (kingsport times-news)


• new yorkers love eating, but this week researchers at the tulane university school of public health revealed that even though we love eating, we're less tempted to snack. as gothamist points out, "we're at less of a risk of coming into contact with snacks at the checkout than anywhere else in the country." i'm not sure how that translates to being "less tempted to snack," since you can be tempted to snack at a lot of other places other than the checkout counter. anyway, there's at least one takeaway from the article--the obesity rate in manhattan is half of what it is in the rest of the country. take that, you mississippi fatties. (gothamist)


• last year during the super bowl, denny's ran ads promoting a free original grand slam breakfast & the promo was so popular that their website had some serious issues. this year, they're bringing back the free breakfast offer & promoting it with a series of ads featuring a "spokesman warning chickens everywhere to 'get out of town' because 'it's going to be a tough week for egg layers.'" in addition to the free breakfast, the first 500k people who sign up for denny's rewards program get a voucher for a free burger & fries and as part of a limited-time offer you'll be able to get refills on pancakes & fries. refills on pancakes? that rules! the downside: you have to go to denny's. (promo magazine)


• the vending machine industry is huge ($30 billion a year) but with the recession & less workers around to spend money on snacks, they have to come up with ways to keep business booming. on wednesday, the national automated merchandising association (NAMA) descended on washington to lobby capitol hill & they brought along a number of touch screen vending machines with them, including "the diji-touch, an interactive touch-screen machine with an interface modeled after the iphone." apparently that's the new recipe for improving the customer experience--make your product more like the iphone. (washington post)

snackdown! - 1.29.10

in a week where president obama delivered his first state of the union address & the world lost howard zinn, j.d. salinger & that short, slightly-creepy lady from poltergeist with the high-pitched voice, it was probably pretty hard for you to keep up with everything awesome that happened in the world of snacking. luckily, i have a brain capacity similar to that of christopher langan & the waking hours of a speed freak, so i was able to find enough brain power & time to concentrate on both snack news and presidents & celebrity deaths & whatnot. just kidding. that's not what happened. my brain's not that big. i just used google alerts & shit. anyway...happy weekend, eat!drink!snack! reader. we have to come up with a better name for you.

• do you like pancakes? how about AUTOMATIC pancakes? are you bummed that you've had trouble finding automatic pancakes anywhere on the entire north american continent? fret no longer, my friend. popcake, a company based in hong kong, announced this week that they've secured distribution of their automatic pancake machine here in north america. as a planet, "more than 20 million pancakes are consumed daily" & i assume that americans, with our love for putting butter & syrup on things, make up a large portion of that figure. just imagine what sort of damage we're going to do now that they're available automatically! (perishablenews.com)


• these days, the cast of jersey shore has essentially become the fourteenth representative from new jersey, but the nj star-ledger wants you to know that jersey's about more than orange skin, greased up fist pumping & displaying your abs. they're also about pizza & over the last six months, the star-ledger's "four-member pizza patrol drove 9,000 miles in the munchmobile, visiting 333 pizzerias and sampling 1,000 slices" to find new jersey's best pizza. all week, they're running pizza-related articles as part of a countdown to the announcement of jersey's best pizza. on a related note, i want a munchmobile. (nj star ledger)


• i'm just going to come right out & say it...five-star restaurants are wack. color me cheap, but i've never been one to swoon over the "experience" of spending hundreds of dollars on dinner. give me a couple tacos or a dolphin's worth of half-price sushi & i'm good to go. i bring this up because in 2010, fancy restaurateurs like david chang are trying to blur the lines between five-star food & regular people food by serving fried chicken. because of this, many have deemed fried chicken a food to watch in the new year. they can have their fried chicken. to be honest, i'd rather have some bacon. (seattle post-intelligencer)


• in south texas, they take their meat seriously. this past saturday, at a cafe in brownsville, the owner & a customer got into a slight brouhaha over the customer's order. the customer was all "i ordered the chicken but you gave me beef." eventually, he & the owner got into it, started tossing food at each other & the next thing you know, the owner hauls off & thwacks the customer with a plate. the moral of this story: in texas, if they serve you beef, don't start a beef. (washington post)


• if you've followed eat!drink!snack! for a while, you know that i think of snacking as an art form. the boston globe's devra first totally agrees with me in her article "a whole new world of snacking." the piece begins with the words "snacking is an art" & then she pretty much confirms everything i believe about eating. big meals are cool & all, but grabbing tasty, awesome snacks throughout your day is totally the way to go, the wave of the future. along the way, she names a bunch of places to eat in boston, places that serve things like a "bing" (china's answer to the slider), a "japanese doughnut, filled with red bean and curry" & lahmejune (armenian pizza). preach on, sister. (boston globe)

snackdown! - 1.22.10

during a week where the entire country was going apeshit over the special election in massachusetts for the late ted kennedy's former senate seat, there were a number of food-related stories that provided a bit of a distraction from the bombardment of political coverage. whether it was the demise of the deep dish or the death of a taco magnate, anything was a welcome relief from the constant "coakley is totally going to blow it" cycle of news.

• story numero uno...mamma mia! there's a trouble down at the pizzeria! on wednesday, boston-based restaurant chain pizzeria uno announced that, in an attempt to save the company, they were filing for bankruptcy. it's been rough going for them recently, what with the poor economy & rising cost of ingredients & whatnot, but i think we all know what the real reason behind their downfall is though...deep dish pizza is lame. (boston globe)


• on sunday, the world was saddened to learn of the passing of taco bell founder glen bell. at the same time, they were surprised to learn that taco bell was named after its founder. mr bell, who founded the chain back in 1962, saw the need to bring mexican food of sketchy origins to the american public. over the years, he achieved that dream & in the process, made a great impact on american cuisine. without him, we may have never known what the hell a "gordita" is...& that would just be sad. (npr)


• with this weekend's afc championship game between the ny jets & the indianapolis colts only two days away, the ny daily news' matthew lysiak has already headed out to indy for the big game. while out there, he's worked himself into a tizzy because he can't find authentic ny style food such as bagels & pizzas & egg creams. to this i offer a hearty "duh." you're in indianapolis, dude. you don't go to brazil in search of sushi. (ny daily news)


• since i'm a glutton, i shove food into my mouth all day long, pretty much right up until the point where i fall asleep. apparently i shouldn't be doing that though. according to lar rune foleide, some science guy who studies dreams, if you wolf down a couple of slabs of roast beef or a bucket of deviled eggs just before heading to bed, there's a good chance that you're going to have some messed up dreams. i guess that explains my "wall street banker/astronaut dog with the head of cuba gooding jr" dream from a few nights ago. (tahlequah daily press)


• monday may have been MLK day, but it wasn't the only important holiday this week, as tuesday was national popcorn day. the holiday, which celebrates the wonders of the air-popped corn kernel snack, is a rather mysterious one, as the national popcorn board doesn't even know how it got started. they do know that the average american eats a quart of popcorn a week though, so if you haven't had any yet this week, you've got a lot of catching up to do. (phoenix new times)

snackdown! - 1.15.10

as part of the ongoing changes here at eat!drink!snack!, this week, i'm introducing a new friday column...the snackdown! every friday, i'll be providing you with a rundown of my favorite snack/food/drink related stories from the week past. this week, we've got a contest for snacking genius, a ban on pork rinds, free cookies, salt chugging & predictions for 2010. enjoy!

• on tuesday, brooklyn's ici hosted "the next big small brand contest for culinary genius," where bklyn batch craft jerky took home the people's choice prize for their "orange-ginger strips of smoke-cured, grass-fed beef" jerky & kombucha brooklyn won the judge's prize for their "pleasantly mild iteration of [their] fermented tea." personally, i'd vote for orange-ginger beef jerky over fermented tea any day of the week. (ny times)


• lovers of authentic mexican pork rinds had their hearts broken this week when the u.s.d.a. announced that starting this thursday, pork rinds not accompanied by an official government certificate will be seized at the border. drug, gun & human traffickers who have always dreamed of getting into the food business rejoiced. (abc news)


• since travel basically sucks these days, companies like doubletree hotels & midwest airlines are trying to ease the pain of travel by baking cookies & dispensing them to their customers. they've both been doing so for around a quarter of a century, but if there was ever a time in history that called for free cookies, it's now. (ny times)


• yesterday, to protest nyc mayor michael bloomberg's latest health crusade--salt--awesome-hatted radio host curtis sliwa decided that it'd be a good idea to call bloomberg "the health care nazi" & then chug a bunch of morton's salt. the results...sodiumtastic hilarity! the "salt crackdown" segment starts just after the nine-minute mark. (ny1)


• it's a new year & with that comes new food trends. "out with the cupcake in with the new," i like to say. the detroit free press looked at some possible trends for 2010, specifically the rise of "umami," the fifth taste. too bad that they misspelled it "unami" in the headline. i'm pretty sure nobody's going to reintroduce an extinct native american dialect in an effort to spice up the food world. (detroit free press)