Category: wtf?

No Cupcake For You

Today on Serious Eats, Ed Levine mentions a piece in The New York Times about a crackdown on parents sending kids to school with cupcakes for birthday celebrations.Apparently, in an effort to stave off childhood obesity, cupcakes are now forbidden.

Folks in the comments section bring up some relevant issues, such as:

  • How can schools get away with selling/providing pizza and french fries in the cafeterias, yet ban occasional treats?
  • If you’re banning cupcakes, does that mean kids are going to stop selling candy bars or Girl Guide cookies as fundraisers?
  • Maybe sending kids to school with a healthy lunch as opposed to cash to spend at McDonald’s every day would mean the occasional cupcake would actually be okay.

The thing to consider is that in the original case, in a Texas suburb, every child was bringing cupcakes for the class on their own birthday. Over the course of the year, that’s a whole lotta cupcakes. It’s also creates a mini class-system within the school; kids whose families cannot afford to supply the class with treats, kids whose parents send store-bought cupcakes instead of homemade, or kids whose birthdays fall outside of the school year, are all kinda screwed in the cupcake wars.

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Potato Baby

Other people find the image of Jesus in their toast, an inspiring, enlightening experience that at least nets them some cash on eBay. Me, I find things that look like deformed unborn children in my fingering potatoes.

I was gonna give it little eyes made from cloves but that only made it a gazillion times creepier.

Maybe I should search out all the deformed vegetable and set up a freakshow at the local Farmer’s Market. I’d call it the “Sidedish Sideshow.”

Going to Hell(man’s) in a Garden Basket

I saw an ad on TV the other night for Hellman’s Community Gardens. That is, Hellman’s mayonnaise.

Apparently Unilever the parent company, leased a number of empty lots in various cities across Canada, then sent out seed packets with an invitation to write a 150 word essay and submit it in a contest that would see a number of winners in each city.

The downside – the programme is a one-year project and is set to run only until September 15th, regardless of whether the gardeners still have crops in place.

Needless to say, a lot of people aren’t happy about this, accusing Hellman’s/Unilever of using community-oriented initiatives for their own corporate interests. In Halifax, The Coast, a weekly entertainment paper looked at the issue back in May:

“Hellmann’s wants to inspire Canadians to ‘eat for real’ by providing them with the space to grow their own fresh produce,” emailed Sharon MacLeod, the brand-building director at Hellmann’s Unilever Canada Inc.

As of two weeks ago, Hellmann’s had received more than 50 essays from Halifax residents eager to start gardening. But the company’s promotion has inspired something entirely different in at least one Haligonian—anger and scepticism.

“Community gardens are for people. They’re not for multinational corporations,” says north-end resident Geoff Tanner.

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Culinary Mis-Adventures

Giving props where props are due, I’ve got a lot of respect for Loblaws and their President’s Choice line for opening up new gastronomic horizons for the good people of our country and our neighbours to the south. Without the folks from PC offering us everything from peanut sauce to cheesecake, mango dressing to balsamic vinegar, we’d likely still be a society in which meat and two veg was the order of the day. President’s Choice has allowed Canadians to expand their palates and learn about the food of other cultures without shrinking their wallets.

I buy a lot of PC products, and have been known to get ornery as a bear when various items that I like but which sell poorly are discontinued – hello! Wasabi rice chips!!

However, the one thing President’s Choice really doesn’t do well – at least to my taste – is their prepared foods. Their chana masala is bland. Their fish pie lacking in fish, their pad thai is a glommy clomp of noodles that tastes of ketchup.

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If this is the Gospel of Food, Maybe that Explains Why I’m Not Religious

You know how you can go through life believing and trusting someone until you catch them, maybe not in an outright lie, but in a tiny fib, or an omission, and then everything after that is tainted with confusion as you try to determine just how honest they’re being?

Thus is my relationship with author Barry Glassner and his book The Gospel of Food.

Glassner attempts to debunk a variety of theories and commonly held opinions and beliefs about food and eating, and for the most part, he writes a well-thought-out argument in which he supports his claims. When it suits him. That is, he tends not to bring up any documentation that might refute his claims, which makes me question not just the issues in dispute, but everything he writes.

I can agree with his opening claim that people who enjoy what they eat have more joyful lives overall, as opposed to people who deny themselves real food on the pretense of health or dieting. In the chapter False Prophets he references writer Emily Green who has written against non-fat dairy products and similar items which she refers to as “nonundelows” for their prefixes of non-, un- de- or low-; foods that have been modified to have their nutritional value, fat, calories etc., removed.

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If Soy Makes You Gay, How Come There Are so Many People in China?

Oh, those crazy Christians. Always questioning the world around them looking for answers to the things they don’t understand. Which would normally be a good thing, except when answers = scapegoating. Now that we’ve confirmed that Tinky Winky and his purse aren’t turning the world’s children into raging drag queens, the time has come for the Christian right to determine exactly what causes “teh gay”.

Apparently, it’s soy.

According to columnist Jim Rutz at WorldNetDaily (an informative site with articles titled “25 reasons to celebrate the nativity”, and why you should pull your children from public school (hint- it’s the debbil!!!), soy, which contains estrogen, is turning the fine, masculine young men of the United States into limp-wristed girlie-men.

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When Was the Last Time You Ate a Shirt?

I want you to find the nearest bag of potato chips. Hint – if you can reach it without leaving your computer chair, that’s a bad thing. Now, read the ingredients list. Unless your potato chips are the super-swank high-end organic kind, I’d bet dollars to donuts that somewhere in that list is either vegetable oil or cottonseed oil. Hint #2 – if it says “vegetable oil”, then quite likely it’s cottonseed oil, at least in part.

Next step, think about this, and it’s not a trick question – when was the last time you ate a shirt?

You’ve probably eaten cottonseed oil a great deal, though, without even realizing it. It’s now one of the standards for frying potato chips because of its high smoke point, mild flavour, long shelf life and low price. If you’ve eaten pastry made with Crisco shortening, you’ve eaten cottonseed oil, although the packaging only lists vegetable oil, and you have to dig hard and deep on the Crisco website to find an ingredients list.

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Booger Thing

Here’s one for the “What Were You Thinking????” file.

Every now and again, I get a craving for Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls. Really, really bad cravings. Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls are one of those weird comfort foods from my childhood – I can remember making the things with my Mom, being allowed to lick out the little plastic container of icing, waiting impatiently for the rolls to bake.

I try not to succumb to these cravings more than one or twice a year, given that Poppy Fresh is an evil little wad of dough full of trans-fats and corn syrup and other shit that will clog the arteries and send the insulin levels catapulting. But when I want the things, I really, really want the things. And today was one of those days.

Greg willingly allowed himself to be dispatched to the two variety stores nearby in search of the tantalizing blue can of fat and sugar. I offered to come with, but I had my nose in the paper and his assurance that he’d only be a minute left me complacent. Surely I could trust my husband to walk the half block to the Hasty Market and select a package of pastry.

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Sheryl & the Chocolate Factory

Every year, Toronto holds a city-wide festival during the last weekend in May called Doors Open where the public gets to go on free mini-tours of places they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see. Many of these buildings are ones that the public can get into if they have a reason to be there, either because they’re on a paid tour, or because they have business of some sort in the place. Few people have reason or opportunity to wander through a chocolate factory, though, so when the news came out that Cadbury was going to open the doors of its Toronto factory as part of Doors Open, people were excited. Unfortunately, while the concept of Doors Open is a good one, designed to encourage an appreciation for historical and architecturally unique buildings, what we got at the Cadbury’s factory doesn’t really even count as a “tour”.

Now I didn’t go expecting to see Oompa-Loompas. I didn’t expect to be greeted by Johnny Depp in a top hat. I didn’t figure there would be a river of chocolate. But on a “tour” of a chocolate factory, I do kind of expect to see some chocolate getting made.

At least put in a nice plate-glass window so we can watch the bars of chocolate whizzing by.

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Channel Surfing

Somewhere in the transfer of cable services from home A to home B, we ended up with a bunch of cable channels we didn’t have before. Besides the fact that we are cheapasses and refuse to pay for a bunch of channels that we mostly don’t watch, we made the well-thought-out decision to cancel all but basic cable a few years back for one specific reason.

I yell at the Food Network.

Honestly, I am flabberghasted that there are unsuspecting housewives out there, tuning in to the Food Network, thinking that they’re going to get decent advice on anything to do with cooking.

(NOTE – with the possible exception of Alton Brown. He’s an alright guy.)

Of course, the extra channels that we are now burdened with include the Food Network, and I have quickly gotten sucked in again. It’s been a few years, so many of the faces are new (although I see that BAM! guy is still there, mucking things up), but it’s reassuring to see that one can get a job hosting a cooking show without any damn idea of how to cook. Note that many of the people I mention below appear on the Canadian Food Network so you US folks might not recognize everyone. [1]

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