Meet The Team / Bill Sertl

Sometimes you just have to ask: "How come I knew that already without having to consult a shrink?" Brace yourselves for this shocker: Comfort food is, well, comforting.

That's right, as noted today in UPI.com, two graduate students from the University of Buffalo conducted an experiment in which three control groups were giving an assignment to write about something that made them feel lonely, but the group whose theme revolved around comfort food was able to pull itself out of the dark mood. (The study, published in the magazine Psychological Science, said nothing about weight gain).

"Throughout everyone's daily lives they experience stress, often associated with our connections with others," says Jordan Troisi, lead author of the study. "Comfort food can serve as a ready-made, easy resource for remedying a sense of loneliness." Glad to have it proved by science, but most of us know this just by using coming sense: Eat mac and cheese, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes can make us feel good but isn't going to help us fit into that swimming suit by summer; salads will make you love the way you look, but you'll be too sad to care. Feeling lonely? Might want to just make a new friend instead of looking to food for the answer.

Jezebel reports that a Facebook group called Supermarket Scrabble, which advocates re-arranging products on grocery shelves to spell out dirty words, is calling for an all-out Spell-In on April Fool's Day. What products, you ask, lend themselves to this brand of merry pranksterism? Well, let's just say that a certain spice label -- one whose individual offerings display a big initial letter on each jar -- makes it especially easy to participate in this X-rated spelling bee.

But before you decide to have some fun down at the A&Pee (oops, A&P), you might want to think about the poor staff who will have to re-arrange all of the lewd lettering. Is it fair that the joke is on them?

What's the matter with Kansas? Well, the salsa served at some of the restaurants in the state packed too much of a punch -- not from spicy jalapeños, but because it was laced with pesticide, reports KTKA News. Not funny, really. A married couple who worked at two different branches of Mi Ranchito restaurant, near Kansas City, was arrested after poisioning the salsa there. The husband, who confessed he was trying to get revenge for losing his job, faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison with a fine of up to $250,00. His wife, the one who actually slipped in the Methomyl-based poison, has already been sentenced to 87 months in jail, with a whopping penalty of $478,000 in restitution. Small comfort for the 36 patrons, some of them children and seniors, who suffered anything from cramps and nausea on up to symptoms so severe they had to be taken to hospital.

Last year, we told you that carrots companies were using junk-food marketing techniques to gain a foothold in the snack market. Now Fast Company has the whole story behind the meteoric rise of baby carrots.

Here are the Cliff Notes: About 10 years ago, somebody tried to figure out what to do with the leftovers that resulted from supermarkets insisting that carrots all be a uniform size. Baby carrots were invented, and they become more popular than the real thing. But when the recession hit, people went back to regular carrots because they were perceived as less of a luxury item.
Oh, dear, what to do?

Spend $25 million to hire the famously creative (and often controversial) ad agency of Crispin Porter + Bogusky (the agency behind Burger King's Delete 10 Friends and Get a Free Whopper campaign) to convince America that, far from being healthy, carrots were the ideal junk food (hey, they're already orange, the same color as Orange Doodles). The idea was to package them like Cheetos and pretzels, in snack-like bags, and to stick them into vending machines (see "like Cheetos and pretzels"). So far, sales are way up -- turns out we're all a slave to marketing. But in this case, that's a good thing.

Read the whole story at Fast Company.

Everything is shrinking, except the deficit. First, TV and the Internet turned our great big world into a global village, and now this: Restaurant napkins have shrunk, from a standard size of 30-inch square about 25 years ago to the paltry 20-inch square we find in most restaurants today.

Most, that is. Some napkins aren't even that big: Applebee's two-ply paper versions measure only 15 inches by 17 inches. Everything you ever wanted to know about this shocking shrinkage is contained in The Great Shrink, an article by William L. Hamilton, in the Wall Street Journal's Life & Culture section. I agree with Hamilton's lament. Being a messy person, I'm tired of my clothing doubling as napery, but at least I've come to understand that it's not my fault-I don't have enough of napkin to begin with.

In his humorous piece, Hamilton notes that the White House uses 20-by-20 linens for state dinners (great, if you're a visiting dignitary), but, as for Buckingham Palace, it would only say that it does not disclose housekeeping information. (I'm sure there's nothing to the rumor that Her Majesty now insists on squares of Bounty in an effort to save the taxpayers money.) Only the French Laundry in Napa County has those luxurious big, 25-by-25 squares of yore. Unfortunately, Thomas Keller's restaurant, often called the best in America, is impossible to get into.

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