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 Charlton Heston in Soylent Green Like the plot of a 1970s Charlton Heston movie, a recent report by Deutsche Bank warns that we’d better get busy on food production in the developing world or we’re going to be processing human corpses into high- protein crackers to mollify an itchy populace of illiterate, starving people ready to riot at the drop of a hat.
OK…that’s not exactly what they said. They were more circumspect. Less Hollywood-ish.
“We are at a crossroads in terms of our investments in agriculture and what we will need to do to feed the world population by 2050,” says David Zaks, a co-author of the report and a researcher at the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.
According to the report, agricultural production isn’t keeping pace with increasing demand. A pile on of additional needs – like water, biofuels and climate change – are only set to make the problems worse.
“There will come a point in time when we will have difficulties feeding world population,” says Zaks.
And what does Zaks suggest we do about said impending mess?
“First we have to improve yield,” notes Zaks. “Next, we have to bring in more land in agriculture while considering the environmental implications, and then we have to look at technology.”
Some of the direct suggestions included investing in “farmer competence” (are you listening Zimbabwe?), improved land use and greater use of technologies like genetically modified crops.
Needless to say, the last suggestions hits at the heart of the pro-organic, anti-genetically modified crops issue. While they all make good points, yeilds (amount of clories produced per unit of land) are the critical factor.
Read more here.
 That’s right, as some bartenders (and their patrons have already discovered, the joys of bacon and the joys of martinis have finally been merged. Behold…the Bacontini!
Courtesy of MSNBC comes this delightful story of mixology at the cutting edge. But hey, I’ll let them describe the underpinnings of this fusion of pork and potato ( I know, I know…good vodka is never made from potatoes but I wanted an alliteration and that’s what I had to work with)…
“So here we are just after midnight and Chesty is behind the bar with bottles of Maker’s Mark that she’d infused with what she described as “awesome apple wood bacon” hours earlier by cooking up some bacon, straining the bacon fat through a napkin (to pick up any solid bits) into the bottle of booze where it sat for six hours or so.
Others have submerged cooked strips of bacon in Vodka for hours to create the “Bacontini,” but Chesty says that bourbon is “better because it brings out the sweetness in the bacon and serves as a good component to bring out the bacon flavor. Vodka absorbes to much of the charcoal smokiness flavor.”
Nom, nom, nom. I am destined to find this treat eventually. My only question is do you garnish with olives…or cheese?
 There's product packaging...and the there's THIS As a marketing guy, I can appreciate effective product packaging. And I’m keen enough on multi-cultural issues to understand that different countries are sometime really different.
But these pictures of Japanese product packaging seem kind of insane.
Japan, after all, has very few natural resources – in point of fact, it imports almost ALL of its wood, metals and petrolium-based products. Being as these things all go into product packaging, one has to ultimately ask what purpose some of these packages serve.
I understand, there’s a market…but markets are sometimes like toddlers – petulant, irrational, shortsighted and self-centered. That’s an equally good description of marketers and packaging designers, by the way…but I digress.
Anyway, as much as I love capitalism, one of the few spot on criticisms of it is that it generates high levels of waste. That said, what is one to make of individually wrapped eggs, plums and other such delicacies.
Check out the story “Japan sizes of food” over at Tokyo Damage Report along with lots of food packaging ideas courtesy of the Land of the Rising Sun.
 It Just Look So...So...Happy! Courtesy of the always entertaining thisiswhyyourefat.com, comes the mighty Corn Dog Casserole.
Since nothing I can write will top the submitters’ (Jessica & Eli) own description, here it is…
Layers composed of hash brown patties, crumbled bacon, baked beans, corn, french fries topped by corn dog slices with mustard icing.
Mmmm. Mmmm. Mmmmmmm!
 "My boys now call me Mum, the Myth Buster!" Australia’s The Daily Telegraph reports that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)has clamped down on a series of myth-busting ads run by Coca-Cola’s South Pacific corporation.
Some of the claims made by the ads included assertions that Coke was healthy, did not rot teeth, wouldn’t make you fat and had about as much caffeine as a cup of tea.
The Daily Telegraph article here
Hindustand Times article here
 I’m not really sure how to take these two articles but together, they paint a pretty lousy picture of the pizza delivery profession – 12 to 14 hour days, idiot customers, lousy weather, getting screwed with, getting robbed and getting taken advantage of….
Come to think of it’s like a lot of jobs out there – from convenience store clerk to police officer to emergency room doctor. I can only say I sympathize. I’ve got friends who deliver pizzas and while I’ve always been a fairly decent tipper, I can see myself throwing an extra buck or two to the guy hauling my next order – if for no other reason than to avoid the wrath of #11.
“I remember every customer who doesn’t tip. I won’t do anything to jeopardize my job, but shaking the soda on the next delivery would not be out of the question..”
I can imagine a lot worse than that, actually. Check out the article with the original 13 reasons here and the follow-up article with the additional 17 reason here.
Get the T-shirt in the picture here.
 They're What?!? Yeah, I’ve been hearing about them for years and yes, they are pig (well, boar, actually) or buffalo or bear (wait a minute…bear?) testicles breaded and deep fried.
Woman’s Day has an article featuring this delightful delicacy as well as a number of others including scrapple, spam sushi and Eskimo ice cream.
Of course, just like Rocky Mountain Oysters aren’t made with oysters, Eskimo Ice Cream isn’t made with cream.
 There’s a baby to baptize and the water pipes are frozen. What’s a preist to do? Pause for prayer with the pause that refreshes.
Priest Paal Dale, from the town of Stord in Norway, managed to improvise a baptism with some flat soda pop.
It had gone flat,’ Dale was quoted as saying by the newspaper. ‘Only the lemon smell made this unusual.’
 Java Street Cafe owner Sam Lippert The concept of tipping is an old one but rarely extends beyond the service aspect of a transaction. However, the owners of Java Street Café have taken the concept to the next level by getting rid of all prices and instructing their customers to pay “whatever they feel is a fair price.”
Despite the headline of the article – and the fact that he’s been intereviewed by CNN, MSNBC and Fox as well as numerous other news outlets – there’s no clear indicator as to whether this is a long-term win for owner. In the short run, however, according to Lippert, “Things have picked up. My sales and customer count are up on a given day between 50 [percent] to 100 percent. And I’m starting to look at being able to bring some of my part-time people on full time and maybe being able to add a couple of new employees.”
 In the UK, 39 pubs a week are going out of business forever. This article, courtesy of Global Post, paints a sad demise to what is arguably one of England’s greatest contributions to mankind. To blame are a myriad of reasons including smoking bans, the rise of automobile use, the conversion of rural areas to bedroom communities for the metro areas and the advent of cheap beer at the local grocery store. One quote even tried to blame the internet.
“We’re heading for a world where people will stare at each other on Skype and hold up a can of chemicals for the camera and call that socializing. “
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