food

Restaurant blogging has many nuances.

You can try, in general, to be constructive, like The Tablehopper. You can try to be artistically idiosyncratic like Orangette or From Lips to Fingers. Or you can decide to make chefs quake in their clogs like Frenchman Francois Simon who once said: "I start judging the minute I come in."

Perhaps that is the set of mind and soul espoused by a Taiwanese blogger (last name Liu) who wandered into a Taichung beef noodle restaurant. If so, it's an attitude that has reportedly landed her her in jail.

You see, the … Read more

Governments should scrap policies to support biofuels because they are forcing up global food prices, according to a report by 10 international agencies including the World Bank and World Trade Organization.

The report adds to growing opposition to biofuels targets and subsidies such as those in Europe, Canada, India, and the United States.

"If oil prices are high and a crop's value in the energy market exceeds that in the food market, crops will be diverted to the production of biofuels, which will increase the price of food," said the report.

"Changes in the price of oil can be abrupt and may cause increased food price volatility," said the report.

Prepared at the request of the Group of 20 major economies, the report addressed price volatility in food and agriculture, and its authors also included experts from the World Food Programme, International Monetary Fund, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. … Read more

Urbanspoon is a location-aware mobile app that helps the indecisive among us figure out where to eat. Open it up, and the Home screen presents you with a number of ways to receive restaurant recommendations or to simply search for a restaurant in your vicinity. You can Browse via category, see what's Nearby, or look at your Friends' profiles. There's also a built-in tool for booking reservations. If you're more into visual stimulation, the bottom of the Home screen displays a virtually endless slide show of photos from restaurants nearby. Swipe through them, find one you like, … Read more

"Welcome to McDonald's. My name is HAL 9000. May I take your order?"

McDonalds recently went on a hiring binge in the U.S., adding 62,000 employees to its roster. The hiring picture doesn't look quite so rosy for Europe, where the fast food chain is drafting 7,000 touch-screen kiosks to handle cashiering duties.

The move is designed to boost efficiency and make ordering more convenient for customers. In an interview with the Financial Times, McDonald's Europe President Steve Easterbrook notes that the new system will also open up a goldmine of data. McDonald's could potentially track every Big Mac, McNugget, and large shake you order. A calorie account tally at the end of the year could be a real shocker.

The touch screens will only accept debit or credit cards, adding to the slow death knell of cash and coins. This all goes along with an overall revamp of McDonald's restaurants worldwide aimed at projecting a modern image as opposed to the old-fashioned golden arches with a slightly creepy (to my taste anyway) clown guy hanging around the french fries.

This puts McDonald's one step closer to opening up its first Alphaville location. At least our new computer overlords will be nice enough to serve us a Filet-o-Fish. Maybe they'll even throw in an iPad with the Happy Meal one of these days.… Read more

MacGourmet Deluxe can help you collect, edit, use, and share your favorite recipes and recipe-related notes in an easy, intuitive, iTunes-style interface, which is much improved over previous versions. This Deluxe version includes all three optional plug-ins for MacGourmet: the Mealplan (to help schedule meals and sync up with iCal), Cookbook (for creating and sharing PDF cookbooks), and built-in nutritional data from the USDA database (which makes it easy to calculate nutritional info for entire recipes). The main recipe interface is highly customizable and includes a large, easy-to-read "Chef View" for laptop-assisted cooking, which you can control with … Read more

Scoutmob is a location-aware coupon service that pushes local restaurant and retail deals directly to your mobile device. No need to print or purchase anything, just scroll through the local 50 percent off (and more) coupons available, click "USE THE DEAL," and flash your screen at the location. It's like Groupon, only simpler and better.

What gives Scoutmob its edge over its other deal-serving competitors is that there's no need to purchase anything ahead of time. If your GPS-enabled mobile device detects that you are at the deal location, you get the deal. And most deals … Read more

TVFoodMaps for Android is essentially a GPS guided tour of all the restaurants featured on your favorite Food Network and Travel Channel shows. For self-proclaimed food enthusiasts, it is a veritable treasure trove of eating advice.

Launch TVFoodMaps, enable GPS, and watch the app immediately get to work searching for notable restaurants in your vicinity. Then choose to view results in either a map view or a list view, which notes distance from your location as well as the titles of the shows that featured each restaurant. Click on an item to see additional details, including the name of the … Read more

If you're concerned about the number of foods you eat that contain pulverized insect bodies, or worry about all the ways another Coke or Pepsi might contribute to your early demise, boy, have I got an app for you.

The folks at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are wagering you're willing to fork over a buck to find out how truly disgusting and/or dangerous the ingredients in your food are with their new "Chemical Cuisine" app. Download it for 99 cents for iOS or Android and you have instant access to an encyclopedia of all those indecipherable ingredients on food labels--things like cochineal extract or carmine, which comes from those unfortunate aforementioned insects and is used to add a nice pink, purple, or reddish hue to your yogurt and other munchies.… Read more

Want to lose weight? Forget fad diets: eat fewer calories. Ah, but easier said than done, right? Counting calories is not only a hassle, it's downright difficult for certain types of meals.

Enter DailyBurn's Meal Snap ($2.99), an ingeniously clever--if not entirely perfect--app that takes a photo of the food on your plate, then delivers an estimated calorie count.

Sounds pretty amazing, right? And it is, though there are limits to the app's accuracy. In my quick and informal tests, Meal Snap easily identified a small pile of strawberries, and correctly estimated the calories at 38-57. … Read more