Ingenial

via

Is this surprising? I don’t know.

The brave souls who dare to enter Bangkok’s chain of Hajime restaurants can place orders on touchscreens, and in return watch a lanky humanoid deliver the dishes, followed by some slick dance moves if its not too busy serving others. Oh, don’t worry, these samurais are tied to a track so they can barely reach you, plus you get to cook your own food in the style of Shabu-Shabu (Japanese hot pot) or BBQ, so enjoy your freedom before they take over your cooking as well.

See more at Engadget

Subway responds:

Eating vegetables in season makes sense, because the amount of energy used to get a blueberry from a neighboring state is a tiny fraction of one flown in from Chile. Local veggies will likely taste better, too. But grocery stores don’t make it easy.

Visit the interactive calender at http://eatseasonably.co.uk/what-to-eat-now/calendar/ or download the PDFs in A4, A3, or A1 sizes.

Incredible story about master bladesmith Bob Kramer:

via Jason Kottke

Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie’s honeymoon he’s enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.

It appears we’ve been duped. Just like the “good old days” and the “simpler times” America once supposedly enjoyed, the food Americans ate years ago wasn’t free from additives and preservatives like some in the health world would have us believe. According to Freakonomics columnist James McWilliams no period in our culinary history has been free from debate about simplicity.

“Did people living in the 1860s really see themselves as eating a simple diet? Not so much. This was an era of frequent food adulteration, with consumer goods being leavened by sawdust, engine grease, plaster of Paris, pipe clay and God knows what else.”

McWilliams argues prominent figures in each period of history have urged Americans to make simple recipes from locally grown ingredients. What complicates matters, however, is discovering when that simple period in history took place exactly.

“And those rugged early Americans?  Yet again we find evidence suggesting that the idealized group—in this case early Americans—saw matters quite differently. The American Revolution drove Americans to define who they were as a culture. After years of approximating the increasingly luxuriant habits of Empire, early Americans reacted to independence by playing up their status as rough-hewn frontiersmen and self-sufficient survivalists. In terms of food, this self-identification meant rejecting luxury for—you got it—the primitive simplicity of the first European settlers.”

It appears primitive food has never existed on American shores, at least not in the eyes of those actually consuming the food. The “modern” ideal of eating simpler food appears to come from a deep-rooted American dream rather than a historical event or time period.

Read the Freakonomics post here.

• The average cow is about 40% steak.

• Kobe beef, the world’s priciest steak, is nearly white when raw.

• 4 of every 5 people fail the Big Texas Steak Ranch Challenge to eat a 72oz steak, a shrimp cocktail, a salad, a baked potato, and a dinner roll, all in under one hour.

• The word “steak” derives from meat on a stick.

• Growth hormones help make an extra 700 million pounds of steak

Read up on each item at AskMen.com

Blind-tasting puts Whole Foods up against Walmart, with interesting results. Could it be that Walmart even actually good for local farmers?

Read the full article at The Atlantic.