Life Savers Go Limp

A new product called Gummi Savers is manufactured by Life Savers, shaped like Life Savers and flavored with Life Savers fruit and berry flavors. In fact, it is Life Savers with the chewy “gummi” texture.

The Pan Smak Saga

Vancouver-based Stan Szary is the pizza king of Wroclaw, Poland, where his Pan Smak (“Mr. Tasty”) pizzeria is moving 600 pies a day. The Poles prefer thin crust, he finds, and yes, they do like kielbasa pizza. Oddly, though, their favorite topping is smoked chicken. (Even odder: Before Szary gained control of his C.E.L. Industries, Ltd., it was planning to open a biotechnology research lab, back when it was owned by the Kuwait Investment Office in London.) Pan Smak is opening two more branches in Poland this spring.

My Brewski Diary

Wine lovers have cellar books for their tasting notes. Now James D. Robertson, author of “The Great American Beer Book,” has produced “The Beer Log,” a big, handsome looseleaf binder of pages for tasting notes facing Robertson’s own notes on several thousand American and foreign beers available in this country; this year he’ll issue update pages covering another 1,000 really rare beers. Obviously a must for the beerophile. It’s $42, including shipping, handling and California sales tax, from Bosak Publishing Co., 4764 Galicia Way, Oceanside, Calif. 92056; (619) 724-4447.

Whoops, It’s Dawn--Gotta Head Back to the Pod

Young red king crabs spend the daytime “podding”--huddling in massive balls of hundreds or thousands on the ocean floor. It’s for protection from predators; they disperse at night to feed.

Yesteryear’s Technology Today

Horizon Organic Yogurt is truly fanatical about this organic thing--no antibiotics, hormones or non-organically grown feed for the cows, and the fruit flavoring (even the coffee) is organic. The barely sour, rather milky-tasting yogurt contains acidophilus and bifidus cultures, thought to be good for microbiological balance in the intestinal tract. Available in 6-ounce plastic cups (79 cents-89 cents) at natural food stores such as Mrs. Gooch’s, and also Bristol Farms Market in South Pasadena.

There’ll Always Be an English Yak Cheese

A British cheese-lover’s society bid $1,450 for the world’s oldest cheese at the Sotheby’s auction house in London on Feb. 2. Thought to have originally been a Tibetan yak milk cheese, the rock-hard, inedible ounce of petrified dairy matter was brought to England 200 years ago by a missionary and the cheese-lovers considered it a point of pride that no French or Germans should take it out of the country.

No Pear Without Thorns

Cactus-pear marketers don’t want us to call the desert fruit “prickly” pears anymore, though they admit the spines (especially the insidious short ones, which are sharp at both ends) make harvest time unpleasant; they can go through just about any kind of glove.