Posts Tagged ‘fast food’
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six”*…
Domino’s in Taiwan has been innovating, and now there’s a new sheriff in town…
The new pizza is dubbed “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall” pizza. It includes abalone, scallops, sea cucumbers, garlic short-ribs, fish skin, quail eggs, taro, dried bamboo shoots, and cabbage.
It’s a step beyond last year’s version which had pig’s blood and preserved eggs while there was another that had a bubble tea (tapioca) topping, which many people found surprisingly tasty.
Another used durian as a topping which has a smell no one could forget.
There has been a growing demand for Western takeaway in Taiwan since the pandemic began and stiff competition has meant some bizarre attempts to get attention…
If you question how anyone could put pineapple on a pizza you won’t want to see what Domino’s has done: “Domino’s lays down the challenge in Taiwan with bizarre pizzas.” [Via the always-illuminating @TodayinTabs.]
* Yogi Berra
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As we reach for the red pepper flakes, we might note that today is the penultimate day of National Pizza Week (which, as a practical matter, your correspondent celebrates every week).
“The science which feeds men is worth at least as much as the one which teaches how to kill them”*…
We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time…
Scientists are replacing crops and livestock with food made from microbes and water. It may save humanity’s bacon: “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.”
* French epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
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As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1943 that an official of the Meats Division of the wartime Office of Price Administration (OPA) announced that, for the duration of World War II, frankfurters (or ‘hot dogs’) would be replaced with “Victory Sausages,” in which a substantial proportion of the meat in those sausages would itself be replaced with “an unspecified amount of soybean meal or some other substitute.”
Victory was achieved; but it was not, in this dimension in any case, sweet.
“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes”*…
One of Northern Europe’s arguably most distinctive exports is “slow TV”: real-time recordings of train journeys, ferry crossings or the migration of reindeer, which regularly draw record audiences.
Among perhaps the most successful — and least exciting — examples of that genre is the live stream of a McDonald’s cheeseburger with fries. At its peak, it drew 2 million viewers a month. The only element on the screen that moves, however, is the time display.
The burger looks the same way, hour after hour.
As of this week, it has looked like that for 10 years.
Purchased hours before the corporation pulled out of the country in 2009, in the wake of Iceland’s devastating financial crisis, the last surviving McDonald’s burger has become much more than a burger. To some, it stands for the greed and excessive capitalism that “created an economic collapse that was so bad that even McDonald’s had to close down,” said Hjörtur Smárason, 43, who purchased the fateful burger in 2009. To others, the eerily fresh look of the 10-year-old meal has served as a warning against the excessive consumption of fast food…
A symbol for our times: “The cautionary political tale of Iceland’s last McDonald’s burger that simply won’t rot, even after 10 years.”
* Breakfast of Champions
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As we muse of the messages in our meals, we might send gloriously-written birthday greetings to today’s epigramist, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; he was born on this date in 1922. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is probably best known for his darkly-satirical, best-selling 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer, and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell– “I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity”– though early in his career Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child. And of course, Vonnegut’s life and work are resonant with Mark Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Author Josip Novakovich marveled that “The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that Vonnegut will “rightly be remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist of the counterculture“; The New York Times agreed, calling Vonnegut the “counterculture’s novelist.”
“It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun”*…
There may be no American institution more polarizing than fast food. Whether it’s wages, health, the environment or those Colonel Sanders ads, the problems associated with the all-American meal inspire lots of detractors. But for many millions, places like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Steak ’n Shake generate fierce loyalty for their convenience, value, ritual, shock-and-awe menu items and community; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2018 that more than one-third of Americans eat fast food on any given day. As the summer season of road trips and Frosties enters full swing, here are five myths about fast food…
Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom, enumerates “Five Myths About Fast Food.”
* Ray Kroc, creator of the McDonald’s franchise empire
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As we chow down, we might send beefy birthday greetings to Rex David Thomas; he was born on this date in 1932. After rising through the ranks at Kentucky Fried Chicken, then helping to found the Arthur Treacher’s fried fish chain, Thomas founded Wendy’s– the burger chain named for his daughter (whose real name was Melinda Lou, but who was called Wendy, since as young child she couldn’t pronounce her name).
“What a museum chooses to exhibit is sometimes less important than how such decisions are made and what values inform them”*…
This cartridge for holding tartar sauce is made of white cardboard; the words “McDonald’s ® Tartar Sauce” are shown in green lettering along with the McDonald’s double arches logo. This canister holds 25 fluid ounces of tartar sauce, and is made to be used with a ratchet gun condiment dispenser. The tartar sauce is used on McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, a menu item developed by a franchisee in 1962 as an option for his customers who did not eat meat on Fridays for religious reasons. The Filet-O-Fish became a nationwide menu item by 1965 beating out another meatless option, the Hula burger, made with grilled pineapple…
From the collection “FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000,” in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of America History.
* Martin Filler
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As we lick our lips, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that Taco Bell announced that the chain would give a free taco to everyone in the U.S. if the Mir Space Station, which was scheduled to re-enter the atmosphere and fall to Earth later that week, landed on a 40 foot by 40 foot target that the company had floated in the Pacific Ocean. In the event, the Mir missed.
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