Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 51

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

 

• A household helper that looks like a mess: the melted ice cream cone door stopper (above).

• Truffle sex: "The black truffle has always been assumed to be a self-fertilizing fungus, but it's not..."

• One of the biggest obstacles to restaurants going green is food waste — hard to track and hard to fix. LeanPath software is trying to help. "When cooks put food waste on the LeanPath scale, they identify it and why they're throwing it away — like overcooked meat or spoiled fish. The software then calculates what that food waste is worth. With that information, a kitchen can figure out how it needs to change, Shakman says. (Watch a demo of how it works here.)"

• One way to combat food waste is the latest condiment trend: crumbs! Eleven Madison Park in New York City has elevated all the leftover seeds and salt that we all stick our finger into the bag to get into "everything bagel dust."

• It's a dark day for west coast oysters. The lease for Drakes Bay Oyster Co. in Northern California expires today. Why anyone would have a problem with an oyster farm we can't image. People, they clean the water.

• A couple of gems we ran across from the social media front: Are you sophisticated enough to "like" Grey Poupon on Facebook? It's a smarty pants campaign from food behemoth Kraft. And Waitrose supermarkets in the UK prove that tweaking on twitter is too fun to resist.  Waitrose Twitter hashtag was asking for trouble when it challenged tweeters to finish the sentence 'I shop at Waitrose because...' "One posted: "I shop at Waitrose because it makes me feel important and I absolutely detest being surrounded by poor people," and commented: "I also shop at Waitrose because I was once in the Holloway Road branch and heard a dad say 'Put the papaya down, Orlando!'" Either the masses are wittier than they thought or they know how to have fun with their image. It got our attention.

• Are You Sophisticated Enough to ‘Like’ Grey Poupon on Facebook?
  
  Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/17/are-you-sophisticated-enough-to-like-grey-poupon-on-facebook/#ixzz2DjymgFe5
  Are You Sophisticated Enough to ‘Like’ Grey Poupon on Facebook?
  
  Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/17/are-you-sophisticated-enough-to-like-grey-poupon-on-facebook/#ixzz2DjymgFe

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 19

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

 

• Food and art cross-pollinate on the site Feasting on Art (image from site above). Read more in this Saveur profile.

• The moving target that is sustainable seafood, and how chefs should make sourcing decisions got more attention in the Boston Globe. "The public perception of chefs is that we operate in some sort of sphere that only has to do with idea and ideologies.  We have a lot of practical considerations."

• Could southern Appalachia become a new world truffle capital? "The next few years are the moment of truth for the burgeoning industry,"says Tom Michaels, owner of Tennessee Truffle.

• Chefs differ in their enthusiasm for Yelp and making everyone a critic. Sometimes it's not half bad: "It used to be that if you got a bad review in the New York Times, you had to close. It was like the theater. There was only one guy who decided everything. There are so many more people reviewing everything today. Nowadays, if you get a bad review in the Times, you can still make it.”

• Kids can now play a host of new farm-centric games on the computer, but they're more Big Ag than CSA.

• For grown-up students who want to get series about farming, college extension programs are offering more for small plot and urban farmers.