Wake Up and Smell the Sandwich

Coffee consumption is down 11%, and people are drinking mostly low-fat milk in the mornings. Here comes another assault on the traditional breakfast: Pitastuffs A.M., which are microwaveable breakfast pita sandwiches. Have an egg, cheese and gyro waker-upper?

More to Love

Here’s a way to test your New Year’s resolutions: Premium-grade, high-calorie Haagen-Dazs ice cream, which has never been available in sizes larger than a pint, will also come in quart-size containers this year.

What’s in a Label

Another blow for Perrier: The Food and Drug Administration will no longer allow it to be labeled “natural sparkling water” because, although Perrier’s carbon dioxide is natural, it is added to the water after it comes out of the ground. From now on Perrier will have to be called “natural mineral water.”

Eliminating the Middlebean

Why wait for the vanilla plant to produce beans just so you can get vanilla flavoring? A company named ESCAgenetics claims it can induce vanilla plant cells themselves to produce the flavoring by tissue-culturing them in a bioreactor. The flavoring, which is said to taste the same as vanilla bean vanilla, would be entitled to call itself a natural product.

Attack of the Wasp Batallion

It hasn’t been tried on food plants yet, but there’s a new tactic for attacking caterpillars without pesticides: using trained attack insects. The Agricultural Research Service Laboratory in Tifton, Ga., has tried Pavlovian conditioning on wasps to get them to seek out plants with caterpillar droppings on them, on the theory that they’ll sting the caterpillars while they’re there. (The Friends of the Wasp may claim this is sheer exploitation, but we’ll let them knuckle it out with the Friends of the Caterpillar.)

Red Wine: Source of Fiber?

Sixteen healthy Frenchmen were ordered to drink three to four glasses of wine every day for two weeks recently. Medical researchers found that red wine apparently reduced the tendency of blood platelets to clump together and increased the level of HDLs (the “good” cholesterol), while white wine increased both good and bad cholesterol and had no effect on clotting.

She’s Never Looked Younger

A bottle of Perrier, a quart of Haagen-Dazs and a microwaveable pita sandwich to Betty Crocker, 70 years old this year.