In a hilarious response to protesters over their 18.2% Tokyo brew, Scottish brewer Brewdog, located in Fraserburgh, rolled out a 1.1% brew which they called Nanny State — a “mild imperial ale containing more hops per barrel than any other beer ever brewed in the UK” and yet no alcohol.  So what good is it, other than making a justified point?

BrewDog founder James Watt explained on his blog: “Anyone who knows BrewDog, knows beer, or anyone has more common sense than a common (or garden) gnome will know that the scathing and unrelenting criticism we faced was pretty unjustified.  If logic serves the same people who witch-hunted and publicly slated us should now offer us heartfelt support and public congratulations.”

But that’s not the case, as the group making the complaints, Alcohol Focus Scotland, said the name Nanny State is indicative that Brewdog was not taking their complaints seriously.  Obviously.  Alcohol Focus Scotland should understand better than most that the point of drinking is to get drunk and that most binge drinking (well here in the states anyways) occurs from the consumption of macrobrewed, low-alcohol piss beers like Bud Light, et. al.  It certainly doesn’t occur from specialty microbrews that cost a good deal.

<shakes head in disbelief>Puritans.</shakes head in disbelief>

If Massachusetts State Legislators have their way the Fluffernutter (a Boston delicacy pronounced fluff’ah’nuttah) will become the official state sandwich.  The dessert-like sammy is essentially a combination of fluff and peanut butter spread ideally between two slices of Wonder Bread.

It’s strange now to think how I used to eat these for lunch practically everyday as a child. Now? Not so much. My stomach is repulsed by the very notion.

Still, I consumed so many that I began experimenting with various combinations as an early teen (some do drugs & alcohol, I did fluff) — fluff with jam, fluff with banana, fluff on toast, grilled fluff (same culinary method as the grilled cheese), triple decker fluff, deep fried fluff with bacon, etc.  This probably explains why I’m a fat ass and my cholesterol level hovers around 250. 

Surely a restuarant would clean up with a deep friend fluffernutter dessert.  Small squares of peanut butter and fluff deep fried and topped with whipped cream and  a fresh berry sauce/compote.

Remember when drinking PBR was great because it was cheap and because everyone else seemed to think it was somehow “cool?”  I mean, in terms of personal branding and cultural flag waving.  There’s something a bit punk-rock (corporately, anyways) about PBR. 

Well, anyways, for whatever reason PBR because the choice of a certain generation, like Pepsi!, instead of other cheap piss-water beers (High Life, Keystone, Olympia, et. al.). 

“Hipsters boosted PBR sales by 17 percent that year, and sales are up a good 24 percent this year, more than other “subpremium” beers that have spent more advertising dollars trying to appeal to recession slummers.”   Now PBR is repaying those peeps by raising their prices as much as $1.50 more than the other piss-water beer brands. 

What this means is that certain people are going to learn to say Champagne of Beers awfully fast.  At the end of the day, sometimes a cold watery-lager tastes great, but spending that extra $2.50 to get a dank six-pack isn’t going to break the bank.

You know you’ve reached the apex of fried-food science (artistry?) when someone, regarded as a genius in the field, essentially gives up and just decides to fry butter. At that point, you might as well deep fry the moldy leftovers that have been sitting in the back of the fridge for the past month. And yet? I secretly want to try it.

Gizmodo explains the ins-and-outs for making a truly great cup of coffee.  There’s a lot of great advice! But.  For most people who buy already-grinded beans from the supermarket and throw it into Mr. Coffee the best thing you can do to take your coffee experience to the next level is to buy a conical-burr grinder and a Bodum French Press.

Drink it black until you’ve developed a palette for the varying tastes of coffee beans (buy good beans too from a place like Stumptown or your local coffee house) and then go back and read Giz’s piece and use their advice to then take your coffee making/drinking experience to a whole’nother level.

I’ve been using the French Press/burr grinder (mine’s not conical and on the low-end at $50) method for a few years now and I haven’t been disappointed.

The NY Times restaurant critic bids his readers adieu and answers many, many questions along the way.  Most of the suggestions are New York City centric, but it’s worth a read regardless.  Some advice that stood out:

IS THERE ANY BEST, SAFEST WAY TO NAVIGATE A MENU?

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

Turns out seafood isn’t just tasty and a desirable source of Omega-3 fatty acids.  But, historically, it could have given homo sapiens a leg up over neanderthals in the competition to survive. 

According to a new study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, it was our ability to eat fish which prevented human populations from thinning when there were game shortages.   

Such flexibility may explain why modern humans thrived in ancient Europe while Neanderthals perished, says Hervé Bocherens, a biological anthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “If modern humans were hunting big game, like Neanderthals, they would compete with them and deplete the resources.”

When big game were scarce, modern humans could have survived and even flourished by eating fish and smaller animals. Neanderthal populations, by contrast, probably shrank and eventually disappeared in areas from which their more limited meal options disappeared.

Of course, the scientists who studied the bone collagen of comparable neanderthals and humans were working with a tiny sample size, so it’s possible this study is moot.  It seems, however, that there would be an intrinsic evolutionary advantage to having a well-rounded diet.

Food dishes are as important a cultural marker as any.  But regional cuisine is also something that binds large groups of people together beyond sports teams, fashion, slang, music, etc.  What would Buffalo, NY be without their namesake wing or beef on wheck? 

And so it seems, that England is once again trying to subvert the national pride and cultural cuisine of Scotland by claiming that haggis is in fact and English delicacy dating to a 17th Century recipe book.  If ever there were a reason to paint their face blue and storm from the highlands with sword in hand, this would be it.

Hmmm.  So this exists.  I’m just going to shake my head Japan and marvel at the stuff you come up with.  But the truth is, would you want to be friends with anyone who actually thinks eating boob pudding is what?  Funny?  Ironically cool? Anything other than creepy? [via]

LuxiRare’s “Lollipop-Pie” offers a delectable answer to the problem of portable pie.  The best ideas are solutions to problems you never knew you had.  But all along you’ve had a pie problem.  They’re just too big to carry in your pocket for a jolt of sugary goodness.

Luxi explains thus:

I want a couple of bites, and I want to be done with it. I want to pop open my bag when I’m hungry and taste a little sweetness. I don’t want commitment. I want to be promiscuous with my food. […]

Rotating flavors. Grab and go. In and out. Blackberry, pumpkin, apple, banana…my favorites. You see I am very slutty about my food.

More info and pictures of the process to make these can be found here.

I give up.  The greatest thing ever has already been invented.  It’s pie on a stick in a bite-sized form.  The wheel was pretty great and all, but I think you can see it hanging it’s head in wonder. [via]

The New Yorker wades into the age-old journalistic conundrum of answering the mystery of American’s collective fatness.  It’s a good ploy for pageviews

I’m not an expert, but I understand the strain that overeating sugary and chemical-processed foods, lack of exercise, bad genetics, high-fructose corn syrup and several other factors have on my flabby torso. 

The problem with this latest attempt by the New Yorker is that they don’t really seem to care about breaking new ground. 

In America today, by contrast, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the “mismatch paradigm.” The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.”

The evolutionary account of obesity is a powerful one—indeed, almost too powerful. If, as Power and Schulkin contend, humans are genetically programmed to put on weight whenever they encounter plenty, it would seem that by this point virtually everyone in America should be fat. Meanwhile, several million years of hominid evolution can’t explain why it is just in the past few decades that waistlines have expanded.

The most alarming thing for me is the size of food portions when you eat out.  Everything is three or four times as much as you should be eating in restaurants and forget eating at the movie theater.  The small popcorn and small soda are the equivalent of the large 10 years ago.  Everything is enormous. 

Before McDonald’s discovered the power of re-portioning, it offered just a small bag of French fries, which contained two hundred calories. Today, a small order of fries has two hundred and thirty calories, and a large order five hundred. (Add fifteen calories for each package of ketchup.) Similarly, a McDonald’s soda used to be eight ounces. Today, a small soda is sixteen ounces (a hundred and fifty calories), and a large soda is thirty-two ounces (three hundred calories). Perhaps owing to the influence of fast-food culture, up-sizing has by now spread to all sorts of other venues. In a 2002 study, Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, and Lisa Young, an adjunct there, examined the offerings, past and present, at American supermarkets. They found that during the nineteen-eighties the amount of food that was counted as a single serving increased rapidly. A similar jump showed up in cookbooks; when the researchers compared dessert recipes in old and new editions of volumes like “The Joy of Cooking,” they discovered that, even in cases where the recipes themselves had remained unchanged, the predicted number of servings had shrunk. According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month.

These articles always remind me of something food journalist Michael Pollian says, and I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s a good place to start regarding your dietary intake: don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

In otherwords, if it’s microwavable, instant, processed, prepared, frozen, comes with food coloring or additives, it isn’t food.

Shocking! Fast food, chain restaurant food and other snack food is sooo vile for your inner organs and blood. This “Good Morning America” bit on what happens to your insides when you eat crap is kind of gross in a truthy sort of way.

The thing is, though, you can feel it afterwards in how lethargic and disgusting your body feels, but to see it. Christ, to see it makes me regret my Independence Day weekend.

Restaurants often rely on horribly cliched copywriting to sell you their food.  All of the suggestions offered should be scribbled on a post-it somewhere next to the place menus and slogons are composed.  Among the offenses:

“Kobe burger”

If it grazed in Idaho, it’s not Kobe. It’s only Kobe if it comes from the Kobe region in Japan.

–”Shrimp Scampi”; “Eggplant alla melanzane”; “With au jus”

Respectively interpreted as “shrimp shrimp”; “eggplant in the style of eggplant”; and “with with juice.”

I understand the need to do this for chain restaurants, where they’re driven as much by marketing as they are by the (lack of) quality of their food, but for all other restaurants this type of bad writing happens more often than one would think.

World Famous.  That’s the one phrase that drives me absolutely bonkers.