food

The Dirty Dozen app is handy to have on your iPhone for trips to the grocery store. It's free and simple: it lists the 12 fruits and vegetables that contain the most pesticide residue.

I'm lucky to live in a part of the country where there are farms nearby and farmer's markets that run all summer and into the fall. When winter arrives, however, I still have to keep berries in the fridge or my fruit-loving offspring may revolt. With the Dirty Dozen app, I have a quick reference to help me decide when to buy organic. … Read more

On February 10, "Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace" will come back to theaters, this time in 3D. That means we can expect to see Star Wars tie-ins squeezed out worldwide.

With that in mind, if you're in Europe and you're near a Quick restaurant, you might want to swing by and try one of the trio of Star Wars-themed burgers. There's the Jedi Burger, which looks relatively benevolent; the Dark Burger, the bun of which has poppy seeds, a sure sign of evil if I ever saw one; and the Dark Vador Burger. Dark Vador is what Darth Vader is called in French (man, they have a word for everything, don't they?), but that's probably not what draws your attention so much as the OMG WHAT IS--

--the black bun.… Read more

Evernote, in addition to helping you keep track of the people you meet with its new Hello app, now also has a tool for keeping track of meals: Evernote Food.

In this app, you can take pictures of the meals you eat (and the people with whom you eat them), add comments and restaurant information, and then automatically sync this information into the Evernote mothership, its synchronized notebook.

It's a pretty lightweight app, but it is kind of fun, and it could be useful, I suppose, if you were really obsessive about recording what you ate. It could also … Read more

Cooking rarely results in the creation of one thing. At the very least, no matter the meal, a drink will be needed to wash it down. For example, a margarita to go with that fresh salsa.

Nobody wants to wrestle with countertop appliances when trying to forge an enjoyable meal, and one way to avoid the hassle is to work with gear that adjusts to your needs. The DeLonghi DFP250 Food Processor And Blender combines two of the most often-used appliances by offering interchangeable work vessels that attach to one common base.

In use, the machine offers a wide range … Read more

Apple's update to iTunes 10.5.1 brings a new scan-and-match service for music that gives users a way to stream their entire collection across multiple devices in the Apple family.

Even better, Apple will actually fill in the blanks of your files' metadata and replace your "matched" files with high-quality 256k-encoded AAC files--an audiophile's dream!

The three of us are so excited that it sounds like we're hosting an infomercial, but check out today's episode to hear more details about iTunes Match.

Also leaked from today's episode: LivingSocial gets into home food delivery with Room Service, PETA puts Mario and his Tanooki suit in its crosshairs, and more events unravel in the ongoing War Against Infographics!… Read more

I won't mince words here: I'm a food poster. (See what I did there? "Mince"? Geddit?)

I'm that friend you have on Facebook who's constantly posting photos of her food. I have a Facebook photo album called "Food," almost all of my vacation albums include a significant percentage of food pictures, and even pedestrian food-related items like the seasonal red cups at Starbucks might show up in my feed.

To be sure, I do this because I'm a foodie. I consider food to be one of the great joys of life. … Read more

Food labels can be confusing, but graphic designer Renee Walker aims to change to that.

Walker says most food labels now are complicated and give people too much information. So she set out to create a design that is more visual and graphic, and one that focuses on ingredients. That could in turn lead to healthier eating habits, says Walker.

In this video, she shows SmartPlanet her designs that she's based on blocks of color, with bigger blocks indicating the major ingredients in the food and brighter colors signifying the ingredients that more natural.

This video first appeared at … Read more

The mobile ordering site went live recently for The Melt's chain of grilled cheese restaurants. The best feature of the app (and The Melt in general): you can add bacon to any sandwich for free. Although since the grilled cheese sandwiches themselves are $5.75, "free" is a bit of a stretch. But still, hey, sort of free bacon!

In the interest of research (and lunch), I checked out the new mobile site and the in-store follow-through at a nearby Melt location. What I found was a bug in the system (presumably a temporary problem), but also … Read more

You willingly succumb to the seductive siren call of coffee, but all that bean shopping, grinding, and espresso machine twiddling is getting tiresome.

Never fear. Your morning pick-me-up is about to get a lot more portable when the caffeine-packing AeroShot hits the market in a few months.

Each AeroShot is about the size of a tube of lipstick and contains 100 milligrams of caffeine in the form of a fine powder. You can get between six and eight lime-flavored puffs from each cartridge. It's a little bit of molecular gastronomy in your pocket.

David Edwards, a professor at Harvard … Read more