Friday Faves No. 134

our favorite finds from the front lines of food

The house that Champagne built: a Russian man has built a house made almost entirely of Champagne bottles in the city of Chelyabinsk, where it is known as the “Palace of Oz.” It took 12,000 bottles, so you'd better start drinking if you want one of your own.(Drinks Business)

In hard new this week, the seafood world has been called out in an new AP Investigation: Are slaves catching the fish you buy? (AP)

Is the Strawberry Field The Next Farmworkers’ Rights Battleground? It's not just hard work, it's literaly poison: "Roman Pinal, the Southern California regional director for the United Farm Workers (UFW), says strawberry pickers are more susceptible to pesticide exposure than the average farmworker because the fields are more densely planted than other crops, meaning chemicals are being sprayed or are drifting closer to farmworkers. What’s more, compared to crops that are harvested once a season, strawberry plants produce fruit every two days—creating a situation where chemical management and harvesting occur “right on top” of each other, he says." (Civil Eats)

New waves of distilling have been a boost for rural areas, and that was the case in the 1920s and 30s too. Old Time Farm Crime: The Hooch Farmers of Templeton "Templeton Rye, “the good stuff,” was a hot commodity in Prohibition era Chicago, Kansas City and New York and its popularity helped save many a family farm in rural Northwest Iowa where the booze was illegally distilled by desperate farmers during the lean years of the 1920s and early-30s." (Modern Farmer)

'New Nordic' goes to the bar with Icelandic Birch Cocktails. (Huffington Post)

A Belgian chef Is making summer in a bottle with gin flavored with lobster. (Munchies)

Now Marriott has a magazine. You could too. Don't worry about all this new lingo. "Content" = stuff worth looking at that makes people like you. “Content marketing is a marathon; it’s not a sprint, said Lisa LaCour, vp of global marketing at content-recommendation platform Outbrain." (Digiday)

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 72

weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Amelie meets butter (above) in one of the coolest cooking commercials we've ever seen.

• Gin is at risk: British gin distillers could be facing a production crisis as a deadly fungus rips through Scottish junipers, leaving the berries “in serious trouble.”

• A new culprit in cod decline? "Scientists believe they have evidence global warming may hold a clue in the mystery of why, despite 20 years of increasingly harsh fishery regulations, cod hasn't rebounded. The species of zooplankton that is one of the preferred foods of larval cod simply can't take the heat."

• How about no more "trash" talk for starters. Short of Cod, Massachusetts Chefs Suggest a Dish of Blood Cockle: Catch Limits Have New Englanders Testing New Recipes, and Names, for 'Trash Fish'

• Foodem, a new tech solution for linking wholesale food buyers and sellers has launched. “Today, you see lots of small and mid-size farms take their produce to farmers markets, but they only sell for individual use,” Rehman said. “Many of those farms could handle wholesale quantity buying, but don’t know how to connect with those buyers. We help them find a market that works for them.”

• And one from the advertising vaults: If you don't have cutting-edge food photography, there's always naked ladies, like this one for Pol pasta in 1905.