U.S. Falling Behind, Flavorwise

Other countries are beating us to the punch with flavored foods. In England you can get potato chips (“crisps”) with such flavorings as turkey and stuffing, roast beef with mustard or prawn. And in Mexico City you can get ice cream in more than 31 flavors: chili, alfalfa, tuna, shrimp, even maguey worm (the worm traditionally placed in a bottle of mezcal).

I Know This Really Great Spawning Ground. Pass It On.

With those tiny legs, you wouldn’t think lobsters would be able to get around very well, but they travel as fast as a mile a day when migrating to their spawning grounds. Divers have filmed them walking along the ocean floor by the hundreds, in columns or single file.

Recycled Coffee

The Novel Cafe in Santa Monica recently had a tasting of Kopi Luwak, the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world. “This exotic bean comes from the jungles of Sumatra,” the owners write, “where the Paradoxurus, a marsupial native to the island, eats only the ripest, best coffee cherries. They are then digested, excreted (no harm coming to the precious beans), gathered by the natives and processed. This is no joke.” At $130 a pound, pally, it had better not be.

Polyunsaturated Pork?

In the continuing attempt to come up with more healthful pork, researchers at Iowa State University are trying a new tack: not making the hogs leaner, but lowering the proportion of saturated fat in the ration they’re fed. The result, says the Wall Street Journal, is pigs that are only 19% saturated fat, as against the usual 25%. The researchers claim there’s no difference in flavor, but there are more tests to do before we find out for ourselves.

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