We see celebrities endorse products every day, and as silly as they might be (What actress actually dyes her hair on her own, rather than getting it done for her?), nothing compares to this little nugget of news. NME reports that Johnny Rotten (of Sex Pistols fame) is starring in new advertisements for a British brand of butter, Country Life. Oh, but they're careful to just call him John Lydon and stay away from his famous Rotten moniker.

Country Life says: "We don't think enough people know Country Life is the only major British butter brand and John gets the message through loud and clear." They continue, "He is seen as a great British icon. His independent views are part of his consumer appeal and his tongue-in-cheek sense of humour shines through in our TV advertising."

Even if most people get the joke, who would want their butter to be so closely linked to the word "rotten"? Maybe they're trying to reclaim the word... Who knows? Too bad there isn't a Tim Spoiled to take over when Rotten moves on.

[via Gawker]

Researchers from Exeter and Oxford U asked 740 pregnant women (all first-time moms) to keep a food diary during their gestation periods.

Their findings? That women who ate more food and more nutrients were 24% more likely to give birth to a boy (specifically, 56% of the women in the group who ate the most gave birth to boys). The average woman who gave birth to a male consumed 2,413 calories a day and ate foods containing potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. The odds of having a boy were also higher among women who consumed one bowl of cereal every day (though the researchers didn't specify whether the bowl was eaten at breakfast or not).

But some people are wary of the stats, saying that a man's sperm ultimately decides whether a child will be male or female, and that diet has little or nothing to do with it.

If anything, hopefully the study will remind and encourage pregnant women to eat a healthy, well-balanced meal no matter what sex their baby turns out to be.

Bored at work? High tolerance for grossness? Check out this B3TA (a juvenile, crude and quite hilarious British "arts" site) message board on "the worst thing you've ever cooked or eaten." The board is closed for posting, but there are 20 pages worth of responses. Some are almost certainly made-up, many are obscene, others so British they may be nearly meaningless to American readers (Bovril? Walkers crisps? Fry-ups?). But a lot of them are pretty darn funny.

Outstanding responses include turkey-wrapped sheep brain, roadkill badger, maggots meant for fishing bait and a chunk of cigar.

As for me, I'm going to have to pick the soggy tripe stew I ate in Argentina. Tripe is fine when all the stomach-y flavor is well cooked out, but this tasted of wet dog and gym socks and old burps, with the texture of snot-slicked rubber tubing. You?

Last week, when I visited the Kitchen Arts and Letters bookstore (I do intend to actually write about that amazing store and post some pictures I took while there), I came across a cookbook unlike any other I've ever seen (and that's saying a lot, as I've been reading cookbooks for fun since I was 7). Written, photographed and designed by British artist/writer/designer/cook Jake Tilson, A Tale of 12 Kitchens it is as much a life history through food/pictures/recipes as it is a cookbook. It starts at the point when Tilson was born and his parents were living in a converted Victorian dairy shop. It moves through his childhood, his memories of the nightly dinner parties his parents hosted and then to his years traveling, marriage and eating his way through New York.

All through the book, keeping step with the prose are lots of images and appealing design choices. There are reproductions of pages from his mother's recipe notebooks, photos of shops and restaurants that were instrumental to his cookery journey and scraps of flotsam from his personal food history. I haven't cooked from this book yet, but having already been touched by the amount of passion and affection with which this book was created, I hazard a guess that the food will also be wonderful.

This is the only book that I've featured where I want to encourage you to go and check out the related website. Tilson and his web designers (although he may have just done it himself) have put a lot of energy into creating an appealing and interesting site. I especially like the fact that you can see a generous selection of images from inside the book.

One might expect price or taste to be the primary considerations when purchasing any food items, including beer and wine, but consumer research in the UK has shown that neither characteristic is more important to shoppers than brand is. 62% of men rate the brand of their beer as the most important consideration when purchasing it. Only 20% of men feel that price is the most important factor (30% of women rate price as a primary concern). It seems that label recognition is just as important when it comes to beer as when it comes to buying designer clothes.

To counteract this, more stores and bottle shops have been using special pricing to try to get consumers to buy certain brands. 33% of shoppers say that "they would be encouraged to go for a good 'offer' on a brand of beer that was not their first choice," almost double the percentage from last year. As a result, beer is sold in increasingly larger packaging, and although the bottles are smaller, to give the impression of value. The same applies to wine, where consumers look for promotions and money-off deals when making their purchases.

Rachael Ray got be one of the most trusted celebrities, essentially, because she is nice. It probably doesn't hurt that she is also cute and friendly, but if she wasn't as nice as she is, she wouldn't be as popular. In fact, people really like their celebrities to seem nice and friendly, with only a few exceptions. The number one exception, the scariest celebrity on TV, happens to be a chef as well: Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay is known for yelling, screaming and occasionally reducing people to tears on his TV shows Gordon's Kitchen Nightmares, Hell's Kitchen and the F Word. He not only has a bad-boy attitude on TV, but he defends the fact that it - treating other people as though they are completely incompetent idiots - is his true character and not just an act.

If you're curious as to which other celebs made the British list, they included Anne Robinson (#2, from The Weakest Link), Fanny Cradock (#5, one of the first celebrity chefs), and Simon Cowell (#10, from American Idol).

Lyle's Golden Syrup, manufactured by the British sugar company Tate & Lyle, has just been honored by the Guinness Book of World Records with the title of world's oldest brand. The sweet syrup is a byproduct of sugar refining and was first put into the distinctive green and gold tin in 1885. The packaging and the syrup have remained almost completely unchanged since that time. The product is found in more than 85% of British households and is popular in countries all over the world.

In the US, the syrup is found at some specialty stores, but is not terribly easy to come by. It has the consistency of corn syrup, but a much more unique flavor that carries over into whatever it is used to sweeten. There are any number of recipes that the syrup can be used in, but treacle tart and ANZAC biscuits are two that are well loved world wide.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is mounting a campaign to educate Britons about "hidden salt, fat and sugar in common foods" to give people some perspective on the foods that they are putting into their bodies and to try to encourage healthy eating habits. Their focus, for the moment, is on crisps. A survey done by the BHF revealed that 49% of children from 8-15 ate at least one package of chips (crisps) each day, and 20% ate two or more. They are consuming roughly 5-liters of cooking oil every year at that rate, or about 1 1/3 gallons.

Crisp-addiction isn't limited to kids, though. As a whole, the nation consumes "a tonne of crisps every three minutes, enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours." Using the number provided by the BHF, which says that the average 1.2-oz packet of chips has 2.5-tsp of oil, there are about 950-gallons of cooking oil consumed for every tonne (2,204 lbs) of crisps, a massive amount over any length of time.

MasterChef Goes Large is coming to BBC America this fall, giving food-loving US viewers a chance to check out a great British reality show. The show is a remake of an older, more subdued British show, simply called MasterChef, and is a culinary competition that challenges amateur cooks to face off against each other to see who is the Master Chef - sort of like Top Chef, only with a seemingly greater emphasis on sheer culinary skill, passion and talent and less on interpersonal conflicts. At least, as much as can be hoped for in any sort of reality show.

The number of contestant s narrows as the season goes on and the chefs face multiple types of cooking challenges. In the Invention test, each chef has less than one hour and a set of ingredients that must be used within the time gram to create a dish. The Pressure test puts the amateurs into real kitchens to see how they fare, as well as giving viewers an inside look at some great restaurants. And for the Final test, chefs are expected to put out their best 2 course meal for a review by the judges.

The show premiers on BBC America on October 2, but if you want to get in the mood to watch, blogger Maki of i was just really very hungry played along with the invention challenges when they aired in Europe earlier this year and tried to make 40-minute meals using the same ingredients that the MasterChef contestants were given to work with.

Most candy stores - particularly those that display their wares in plastic bins with small scoops to dish the candies into individual bags - stock a wide variety of gummy candies: gummy worms, orange slices, sour cola bottles, etc. Some candy stores in the UK are stocking a more unusual gummy, a beer-flavored one. Dubbed pint pots, after the old-fashioned handled beer glasses, the candies taste just like beer. They are nonalcoholic, but it makes you wonder who exactly these candies are marketed to. I know that I don't see a whole lot of adults perusing the selection at candy stores.

Frankly, these actually seem a bit worse than candy cigarettes, which at least don't taste like the real thing, potentially developing a taste for the product they're based on in young candy-lovers.

[via Popgadget]

The British kitchen equipment firm Kenwood conducted a study that found that 33% of Britons have never cooked a meal. While it's safe to assume that beans on toast doesn't constitute "from scratch" cooking, they didn't specify what level of culinary proficiency was needed to qualify, although they noted that only 34% cook completely from scratch, so there was clearly a middle ground that was taken into account. Cooking aside, it is difficult to ignore the fact that most of their survey respondents said that they prefer to bring in all or part of a meal, rather than cooking it themselves, and that 7 in 10 spend less than one hour on each meal they make.

A nutritionist who analyzed the results said that cooking is perceived as taking time, effort and money, but the fact that 5 in 10 people said they were "happy to spend £100 or more on a meal out" suggests that perhaps people really just don't like to cook -or even that they simply can't, despite the popularity of food programming on TV - rather than that they feel they are spending too much time or money when they do.

Getting a book translated into a new language, whether it is the second or tenth, and published in other countries is a very big deal to most authors because it means that their writing is good enough to cross cultural boundaries and appeal to people in other parts of the world. When that book is a cookbook, you would naturally assume that the same thing applies and that the people in the other country are interested in making those recipes.

Jamie Oliver's cookbook, Jamie's Italy, is due for publication in Italy this year, but some feel that the release of an Italian book written by a non-Italian is doomed to failure. Critics say "Italians don't really learn from books: they learn from their mothers, their grandmothers and their aunties" and "[Italians] think their food is the greatest and they are not going to accept an English guy trying show them how to cook Italian food."

But the market is changing and while the older generations do not necessarily want or need to add cookbooks to their library to increase their repertoire, younger ones do. Jamie Oliver is only 31 and there are thousands of younger people, in Italy and other countries, who are interested in getting a new take on food - even if it is "their" food to begin with. Supporters - and the Italian publishers who bought the distribution rights to the book - clearly think that Oliver's enthusiasm and recipes will carry over well in the new market.

Anywhere from 1-6% of Britons suffer, to one degree or another, from an allergy to latex. The rubber-based product is used in several types of food packaging materials, including rubber bands, stickers and adhesives. Often, these products to not come into contact with food at all, but a recent study commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) found that in some cases the latex is transferred to the food. It can take as little 1 one billionth of a gram to trigger a latex allergy, so some groups, like the UK's Latex Allergy Support Group, are calling for a change in labeling guidelines to protect consumers.

The FSA has said that it is too soon to draw conclusions based on the results of one study. There is no information available yet on how many, if any, allergic reactions have actually been caused from a food-related exposure to latex.

Two British researchers have published a study suggesting that hunger may relate to how men perceive different female body types, BBC News reports. The researchers surveyed 61 male college students coming and going from a university dining hall, first asking them how hungry they were and then asking them to rate a series of photographs of similarly dressed women of varying weights and body types. The half of the group that said they were hungry rated heavier women as more attractive, according to the abstract of the study, which appears in the British Journal of Psychology. The researchers now plan on reversing the study to see how hunger affects female perception of male body types.

Chutney is becoming a more and more popular condiment, but most people don't know exactly what it is - in large part because there are so many different kinds of chutney available.

Chutney, in its basic form, is a condiment that contains fruit, vinegar, sugar and spices. It originated in India and was discovered by the Western world when British soldiers and colonists brought recipes back to England, along with other popular Indian foods, such as curries. It can be thick and chunky or smooth, and has a heat level that can range from very sweet to very spicy. The mixtures can be either cooked or uncooked and virtually all of them rely on the addition of chilies for heat. Mango chutney is probably the most popular variety, in part because mangoes are a popular fruit in India, but also because it was the first chutney that was widely available to Europeans.

Broadly, a chutney is basically a type of relish and there are really and endless number of variations that can be made on the theme, such as Fresh Peach Chutney, Melon Apple Chutney, Green Tomato Chutney and (of course) Mango Chutney.