Lucky Dip – Monday, August 8th, 2011

Dear restaurants, please don’t go thinking that hundreds of posts about your restaurant in the matter of a few hours, all using the same hashtag and (if you retweet every single tweet) flooding the twitter feed of everyone who follows you, is necessarily a selling point to make your place seem hot and vibrant and trendy. In fact, it’s annoying as hell and a real turn-off. Although that hashtag does make it easy for the rest of us to mute all the tweets and never have to see anything about your tweet-up (and possibly your restaurant) ever again. Social media can be a fabulous tool, but only if you use it judiciously. [The Grid]

It’s almost CNE time. You can tell because the ubiquitous (and horrifying) food-on-a-stick articles have started. Seriously, fudge? Why do you need a stick for fudge?? [National Post: Posted Toronto]

Fish-eaters – you know that all of these great promotions to get us to eat more sustainable species of fish really only work if you switch from the typical cod, salmon, tuna, right? Eating more fish overall, because you’re still eating just as much cod, but now are also eating mackerel, really defeats the purpose, yes? [The Guardian]

This will get your goat – Ontario’s goat industry (milk, cheese, tasty curry) is booming. [Toronto Star]

Continue reading “Lucky Dip – Monday, August 8th, 2011”

Feeling Lucky?

As promised last week on TasteTO, the Lucky Dip column will be migrating to this site as of tomorrow.

There will be some changes, however, and it will morph into a combination of the local Toronto news links we were running on TasteTO and some international food stories and issues that I featured daily in the Food For Thought column on Save Your Fork. Part of what caused me to burn out over at TasteTO was the idea that we had to link to everything, which meant that I had to at least read everything, which got frustrating when the posts were bad, not to mention that it also ate up many hours of my day, every day.

This version will be a curated selection of food-related stories that I personally like and/or find interesting; either because they are well written or because the topic is important or unique. This may not be to everyone’s satisfaction, but it will keep me from getting cranky, which, in my world, is my top priority.

In those other columns, I also tried to always have at least 10 articles each day; even if some of them were not so great. In this version you’ll get what I like; that may be 10 or 15 or 5 different things, it will depend on the day. Plus, I reserve the right to say “to hell with it” occasionally and go to the beach. Well, probably not the beach, but you get my jist. One of the things that I grew to loathe was the required commitment to churn out those posts every day, even if I didn’t feel like it, even if there was no good content to include. On days when I’m busy or would rather read a book, y’all are outta luck. (Get it?… heh.)