Cool Things I Learned from “The New York Times Magazine’s Food & Drink Issue”:

Isn't this a nifty way to get them out? Yes, it is.

The original kitchen whisks were handfuls of twigs used in 17th Century Europe.  Two hundred years later, the Victorians began making them out of wire.

Al Michaels has “never eaten vegetables.”

Ital food, the food of the Rastafarian religion, is vegan except for the inclusion of fish.  And here I was thinking that the West Indian places in my neighborhood that sell “soy chunk stew” with roti were making concessions to the marketplace.  As if Rastas make concessions.

5,000 years ago much wine was made in qvevris, huge beeswax-lined clay pots that are buried in the ground.

California’s Central Valley is the world’s largest Class 1 plot of soil.  It’s the largest supplier of canned tomatoes in the world and grows most everything under the sun.  Three of its cities are among the five poorest in the nation, and the microscopic dung from industrial megadairies and feedlots and the exhaust trapped between the valley’s mountain ranges make the air taste like shit and rank amongst the most polluted in the country.  The place is going down it it doesn’t get checked.

A farmer named Paul Buxman is promoting his California Clean system, which unlike an organic classification system allows for chemical fertilizers but limits participants to farms less than 100 acres and which have active plans promoting healthy soil and local ecosystems.

We have no national food or farming policy that protects our farmland from depletion or promotes the public health.

The Times ran an illustrated telling of the Frederick the Great Potato Scheme I believed I had noted here (but was apparently mistaken, and which I will now have to address next week), adding the fact that folks to this day place potatoes on Old Fritz’s grave

There exists a photo of Bob Dole eating a hot dog in such a way that it sure looks like he’s giving a blowjob.

Because there's no better way to turn The Politician into The Common Man than making him eat in public.

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion (8,000 B.C. & 1740)

The historical trajectory of potatoes joined ours sometime between 8,000 and 5,000 B.C.  The Incas developed enough different varieties that, according to National Geographic, they could glean every nutrient needed for survival from a potato-only diet.  They included spuds in their prayers.

The rest of the world was not so enamored.  When the Conquistadors introduced potatoes to Europe in the 1500s, folks suspected them not merely deficient for human consumption, but injurious.  They are not mentioned, after all, in the Bible.  Their lumps and eyes suggested disease in an age in which the appearance of a vegetable was often thought to reflect the maladies it could cause or cure.  In 1633, French Burgundy felt the need to pass a law forbidding people “to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy.”  Continue reading