Bloggasm

Everyone knows that bunny rabbits have a lot of sex. Well, North Korea has decided that they can use this fact to their advantage: they’re encouraging their citizens to breed rabbits as food chiefly for that reason:

North Korea is encouraging its people to breed rabbits for food, the regime‘s official media reported Wednesday.

“Rabbit-breeding farms have been built to rapidly increase parent rabbits which have a high fertility rate, grow fast and produce much meat with less feed,” KCNA said. “Rabbits are being raised by collective and widespread methods at factories, enterprises, cooperative farms and schools, to say nothing of stock-breeding farms.”

Rabbits better start practicing safe sex. Their species may depend on it.

It turns out that McDonald’s has trademarked the “Mc” prefix for any product or organization, and not only sues when a food company uses it (which is reasonable) but when non-food organizations use it as well (complete bullshit).

Malcolm McBratney was a rugby player who used the term “McBrat” on his team shorts, and for some reason McDonald’s decided they needed to sue for trademark infringement. They lost:

AN intellectual property lawyer has won a David and Goliath battle against fast food giant McDonald’s for the right to use the name McBrat on his rugby team’s shorts.

Malcolm McBratney, a partner in Brisbane legal firm McCullough Robertson, said McDonald’s, had been using “bully boy” tactics in seeking to prevent the Brisbane Irish team from using the name “McBrat”.

The ruling was mailed to Mr McBratney by the Australian Trademarks Office in Canberra, following a hearing in April this year when McDonald’s objected to the Brisbane lawyer’s trade mark application.

I understand that companies enforce their trademarks in the fear that they’ll become widely misused if they let a few cases go by unnoticed, but sueing a Rugby team in Australia for using a “Mc” prefix, especially when it’s obviously referencing one of the player’s names? C,mon.

One of the coolest things about the book Fast Food Nation is its outline of taste science. There are scientists out there whose only job is to harness taste at the molecular level and then comb out all the impurities that hinder that taste. It’s a fascinating field of study, one open to much debate because of its subjectivity, and now Nestle Research Center is jumping on the bandwagon:

Nestlé Research Center, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, are pushing back the boundaries of scientific knowledge for the food industry by using molecular physics to explore the properties of carbohydrates in food.

And expanding understanding could lead to food formulation with improved flavour impact and nutritional value, suggest the researchers…

…Dr. Ubbink explained that the food industry is being challenged with increasing demands on flavour impact, nutritional value, food stability, consumer acceptance and so on, and in order to optimise our food systems and processing routes new rational ways need to be found.

The science in this particular case focuses on how specific kinds of sugar can crystallize. They can actually control carbohydrates and reduce the fatty acids without sacrificing the taste.

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Yes, as silly as it sounds, Burger King will be making a movie that will probably amount to one big advertisement. It will cost about $10,000,000 and won’t have any big stars. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were of those teen movies that goes straight to DVD. As Cinematical reports:

According to Advertising Age Magazine, we will soon be subjected to a Burger King movie. I know what you’re thinking. When I read this article, I thought I’d woken up in the wrong universe this morning. But it is apparently true. The fast food company is working with the advertisement firm Crispin Porter & Bogusky on the project, which has a partially written script but no director, cast or studio. No plot was given either, but the firm says it will take place in an apartment above a Burger King and will be a cross between Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Raising Victor Vargas and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, intentionally avoiding the kind of dumb comedy featured in another fast-food-advertisement of a movie, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. The budget will be under $10 million and the movie will not feature any name stars (as if any would do this).

What’s even more curious is that their new entertainment mascot (the King) won’t be in the movie. I wonder if they’re going to hire the writers for their commercials to the script? If so, I hope they get one of the writers for the “Whopper Heads” commercial with the cop.

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Chef Melissa is from Panamà , where she is the founder and executive chef of Panamà Gourmet, Inc., a culinary consulting firm providing innovative products and services for prestigious industry clientele. A graduate of the US Personal Chef Institute and certified by the US Personal Chef Association, Melissa has trained professionally in the US, Mexico, Panamà , South America, Europe, and Asia. In 2002 she traveled to Bangkok, Thailand for an intensive Thai cooking course at the internationally renowned Oriental Hotel Cooking School. In addition to running her company, she also shares her passion for cuisine through cooking classes, television appearances, and adventures throughout the southern hemisphere. We’re especially fond of her online culinary journal, The Cooking Diva Blog. The name says it all.

Simon Owens: Would you say that you have a specific realm of expertise when it comes to cooking, or do you like to try recipes from all cultures and walks of life?

Cooking Diva: I am a professional gourmet-world traveler and connoisseur. The fact that I have spent endless hours training in cooking schools all over the world and cooking my butt off in every kitchen I am allowed to visit, is no reason to set me aside of the crowd, right? To answer your question, YES, I love to try recipes from all cultures and walks of life

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that photos of cooked food have a very picturesque quality to them. Do you think that by posting the pictures of the food you cook, it motivates your readers more to try the recipes?

Cooking Diva: I am a very visual person, IF I like what I see, then I’ll eat it. It is very important to get the message to our readers, in our case, we do it through delicious looking pictures.

Simon Owens: How often do you invent your own recipes? And how often do you try to improve or modify the recipes of others?

Cooking Diva: Once in a hundred years I follow somebodyelse’s recipe to the end. It is a tough thing to do anyway. Sometimes I “find inspiration” somewhere else, but the ultimate product is always mine.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

Cooking Diva: that’s an easy one (in no particular order):

El Oso-NET
Gallery of the Absurd
Global Voices
TecnoChica
Directo al Paladar

Sweetnicks: For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to own a restaurant. And for even longer than that, I’ve wanted to be a journalist. This blog was a way for me to combine some of my passions and basically “keep at it.” I have a three-year-old son, who my site is named after, who loves to cook almost as much as I do and “helps” me in the kitchen daily. As soon as he sees me anywhere near the stove, he pulls over the stepstool and asks if he can help me. Recently he told me, “Mommy, you’re just like Rachael Ray, but you’re not.” He loves Rachael Ray, so I guess I’m in good company. Between him, The Husband, The Neighbors and my family, I have plenty of people to try out new recipes on … and who continue to inspire me.

Simon Owens: Animal blogging (both cat and dog) has become a huge fad with bloggers. Why do you think this is? Is it the cute nature of the animals or is there something else that adds to the appeal of posting pictures of animals on blogs?

Sweetnicks: Clare from Eat Stuff first tuned me into the whole animal blogging thing with her regular Weekend Cat Blogging event, which I frequently join in on. I thought our dog, Eli, might be feeling a tad jealous, so I asked Clare if she minded if I did a spin off, and so Weekend Dog Blogging was born. Food bloggers obviously think about other things besides food (some of the time, anyway!), and cute dogs and cats are a nice diversion … and it gives us a little glimpse into everyone’s “other” life, the life they have outside of the food realm. The WCB/WDB has also spawned Weekend Herb Blogging, which is hosted by Kalyn from Kalyn’s Kitchen.

Simon Owens: Whenever you post a recipe on your blog, do you every try to change the recipe at all to make it healthier? Do you think that food bloggers have any kind of civic responsibility in giving healthy food tips to their readers?

Sweetnicks: I don’t necessarily try to change a recipe to make it more healthier. If I tinker with it, it’s more to tune it in to our particular tastebuds and likes or dislikes, or to just play with my own creativity, or simply saving a trip to the grocery store. I think we eat fairly healthily in the base case, so I don’t worry about the occasional Creme Brulee every now and then. All things in moderation. But for both my readers and my own family, this week I kicked off a new weekly event, ARF/5-A-Day Tuesdays, where food bloggers who make a recipe that features an ARF (Antioxidant Rich Food) or a fruit or veggie, or any combination of these things, are featured in a round-up. New year, new outlook as usual, but I wanted to focus on getting more ARFs, fruits and veggies into our own diet, especially with a three-year-old son, and I knew if I made it a weekly event and got fellow food bloggers involved, a) it would keep me on track and doing it regularly and b) I get lots more inspiration that I might if I was just doing it on my own.

Simon Owens: Can you please explain to Bloggasm readers what Friday Night Date Night is and what it entails?

Sweetnicks: Ahhh, the Masterminding of Moms. Regular readers know we hang out with The Neighbors a lot, whether it be impromptu get-togethers or our regular The Neighbors Dine Over Sundays. Their daughter is nearly 3 and is our son’s girlfriend (he’s 3-1/2). Yup, they start young. They are beyond inseparable. They see each other in school, talk on the phone at night and are joined at the hip. In fact, they even “blink lights” before they go to bed, each of them blinking their bedroom light, as a last “kiss” goodnight. So, they play together Friday nights. I came up with the idea that if we took turns whose house they were at, the parents could escape for a kid-free night, so we alternate. It’s worked out really well for all of us, and we definitely look forward to Friday Night Date Nights!

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

Sweetnicks: There’s a ton of food blogs I frequent daily, so it’s hard to name just five, but here goes:
White Trash BBQ. Something off the beaten path that isn’t overdone in the food blogging world.
52 Cupcakes. I don’t make them often enough, but love them, so I can live vicariously through the Cupcake Queen.
Eggbeater. Shuna is raw, honest and cracks me up sometimes.
Eat Stuff. Clare’s blog was one of the first blogs I ever started reading, and I keep coming back for more. And as the mistress of Weekend Cat Blogging and godmother of Weekend Dog Blogging, how could I stay away?
Small Farms. I love the passion Tana brings to her blog, and the exposure she keeps on the farms.

You can find Sweetnicks over here