Weekend Reading

WEEKEND READING – 10/8/2016

Marvo / October 8, 2016 / Weekend Reading / 1 Comment

Here are a few interesting junk food-related stories from the past week or so. Enjoy.

Via The A.V. Club: Here’s how ice cream sandwiches are made

The clip, aptly titled “Ice Cream Sandwiches,” goes through the process of how ice cream sandwiches are made, from wafer baking to the almost eerie precision with which a giant ribbon of ice cream is cut and sandwiched.

Via Mic.Food: The wonderfully strange secrets of a food stylist

Common tools for food stylists are tweezers.

Via Bloomberg: Now Delivering: Google Brings Us Burritos by Drone

It hovers about 25 feet above a bullseye on the grass. A white trapezoidal box descends, does a little pirouette, and then lands with a plop. Agents quickly converge on the payload: a braised pork burrito.

Via The New York Times Magazine: The Quest to Make a True Blue M&M

So researchers are still looking everywhere for other natural blue pigments. Among the contenders being tested in laboratories are a berry found in Central and South America, the huito, traditionally used to make dark blue, semi-permanent ceremonial tattoos and as a bug repellent; a blue gardenia flower; red cabbage; aged red wine; a bacteria used to make Swiss cheese; the Japanese kusagi berry; butterfly-pea flowers; and pigments derived from soil bacteria, tree-root fungi, sea sponges and mushrooms.

WEEKEND READING – 10/1/2016

Marvo / October 1, 2016 / Weekend Reading

Here are a few interesting junk food-related stories from the past week or so. Enjoy.

Via NPR’s The Salt: Our Robot Overlords Are Now Delivering Pizza, And Cooking It On The Go

Collins and I are standing inside Zume’s solution: a delivery truck that looks standard — like something from FedEx or UPS — only it has 56 mini-ovens. They’re neatly stacked into two racks on wheels.

Via Eater: All Hail the Pizza Saver

Pizza’s most essential topping is a piece of plastic

Via The Daily Beast: Who Actually Created Buffalo Wings?

While reporting his buffalo wings story, Trillin met a black man named John Young who claimed it was he who by all rights deserved credit for inventing buffalo wings.

Via Quartz: How unsanitary is double dipping anyway?

Double dipping—practice of dipping a chip (or cracker, carrot, or anything other food that can be dipped) into a dip, then biting onto it, and dipping it again with the bitten side down (dipping a non-bitten corner of a previously bitten food does not qualify as double dipping)—is widely frowned upon and considered, aside from plain gross, unhygienic. But how bad is it, really?

Via Food.Mic: The true — and truly creepy — history of Ronald McDonald

Ronald McDonald is a creepy dude. Not only is he a clown, which is chilling enough, but he’s a ghost-white, sketchy character who literally lures children into eating junk food.

WEEKEND READING – 9/17/2016

Marvo / September 17, 2016 / Weekend Reading / 3 Comments

Here are a few interesting junk food-related stories from the past week or so. Enjoy.

Via Bloomberg: Why Supermarket Bacon Hides Its Glorious Fat

Fat is flavor. But we’ve also been taught that fat is unhealthy and unappealing. And this tension may explain why bacon has one of the most unusual and underappreciated packaging formats of any supermarket product.

Via NBC News: Chips So Good You’ll Have to Go to Jail to Get Them

That’s because the chips — which taste like a combination of salt and vinegar, barbeque seasoning, and a little bit of every other flavor ever known — are not sold in stores. They’re “jail chips,” meaning they’re produced and sold exclusively for America’s prisoners.

Via Atlas Obscura: The Rise and Fall of Fruitopia, the Trippiest Beverage of the ’90s

If you were exposed to Fruitopia as a youth, chances are that you remember it vividly. The drink, with its day-glo colors and funny flavor names, was somehow both adult-approved and delicious.

Via The Atlantic: Can Fake Junk Food Truly Satisfy?

Healthy eaters, rather than just eating bland plates full of plants or completely cutting out foods they’ve deemed unhealthy, instead are using fruits and vegetables to create fake versions of the things they crave.