France's Environment Minister and Resident Party-Pooper Jean-Louis Borloo is pushing a proposal that will force bars open later than 2 a.m. to administer breathalyzer tests to patrons before they leave the establishment.

The move is in response to a spate of fatal car accidents involving drugs or alcohol.

Some immediate obvious questions: Who will be in charge of administering the tests to everyone who leaves? What happens if a patron argues, or refuses to take the test? Will he or she be chased down and fined?

What do you think? Are mandatory breathalyzer tests a good idea, or an invasion of privacy and a waste of time? Would you agree to take one, even if you'd had one beer, or weren't driving home?

It's hard to resist a drink that's emerald green, slightly illegal, and known for making 19th century Parisian artists go insane.

Absinthe has always been a hit with a certain, artsy, Bo-Ho crowd. And it's lately been making a comeback, since being legalized in this country for the first time since 1912.

But until recently, finding the good stuff has always been hard. Too much of what's been smuggled into the country tastes like radiator fluid. Indeed, for a long time now, absinthe has been more a party favor than the edgy beverage of sophisticates it's supposed to be.

No longer. A small candy company in (where else?) San Francisco has created absinthe lollipops. According to its website, the inspiration for these grown-up treats came around Halloween last year, "When we found ourselves with a lot of absinthe and no candy."

Snooth.com will flock to your rescue.

Log onto the site and access over two million reviews from both professional wine critics and average wine lovers to choose the perfect accent to tonight's dinner.

You have to sign up to be a member if you want to write your own, but anyone can search for reviews. The simple interface makes it hard to screw up - just type in your search term and you're immediately inundated with dozens of potential choices.

Not sure what to search for? Snooth suggests using terms like "Cab Sauv," "good with pork," or "spice," and if the responses are too overwhelming, you can further narrow your results by price, year, type, region, or varietal.

...But don't blame us if you walk away more indecisive than when you started.

My grandfather, who died in 2001 at the age of 91, used to proudly announce that he had been subscribing to the New Yorker since its inception in 1925. Whether or not that tidbit was exactly true, that magazine lost a loyal customer when he died, as he did subscribe as long as I knew him (and I was nearly 22 when he made his exit). I used to love to sort through the stacks of back issues that lived on the coffee table in my grandparents' den whenever we visited them, for the old food issues as well as any that featured fiction from authors I knew.

The folks at the New Yorker have put together a slide show of 21 covers that feature food, drink and dining that range from 1925 all the way up to September 2007. It's an interesting thing to take a peek at, because it gives you a glimpse at how our cultural perspective on food has shifted.

[via Serious Eats]

I have to say that I am fed up with all the energy drinks crowding the market. Personally I don't need energy, I have too much as it is, and they give me the jitters. What I want to do is relax! Part of my plan to relax is moving to a less stressful environment surrounded by beauty and nature, where life is a bit slower. I can always visit the big city for work or play, but don't have to live there. The other thing I can do is drink a Blue Cow Relaxation Drink, if I can find any near me. Or I could order it online direct from the company.

The company says that Blue Cow is made with "Chamomile, Hops, Passion Flower, Hawthorne Berry, Lemon Balm and most importantly, and Suntheanine®." Suntheanine® is a brand of pure L-Theanine, it is "the primary amino acid found in green tea" and this green tea derivative "helps relax without creating drowsiness."

Well the interesting ingredient list does have several herbs that do in fact help you to relax. Chamomile tea has been used for millenia to calm you down, as have the other ingredients. Although I have found that Hops can give you some pretty vivid dreams at night. The list of things it doesn't contain is interesting as well: zero calories, zero caffeine, zero carbs, and zero sodium.

It isn't really fair to call this review a "taste test," because I have basically resigned to the fact that any energy drink, no matter who makes it, tastes horrible. Even Diet Coke, which could be considered an energy drink if you take into account the caffeine, is an energy drink, and the taste is starting to wear on me. A lot. That's what two to three cans of soda a day will do to you. It wears you down.

G Pure Energy comes from Norwegian Ole Sandberg, the maker of high end water, Voss. If you didnt' know that intellectually, you'd certainly be able to sense it from the bottle's design. The bottle, like Voss' bottle, is made of glass, and is topped with the signature large silver screw-on top. This bottle, however, has a curve, which could be interepreted and sexy and gorgeous, or maybe a little scary -- you know, like someone drank a little too much G Pure Energy and gripped the bottle too hard. (And that with the bottle's even being glass!)

Two 14-year-old New Zealand girls made the news recently when their school science project revealed that Ribena, the popular black currant drink, did not have the high levels of vitamin C it claimed to. According to a story published yesterday in The Guardian, the girls were testing a variety of beverages, expecting to find that the less expensive ones had less vitamin C, when they discovered the opposite. Their results were picked up by a local news show and then eventually a national watchdog group. Today, The Guardian reported that GlaxoSmithKline, the drink's producer, is being fined almost $160,000 for misleading ads, which stated "the black currants in Ribena contain four times the vitamin C of oranges." A GSK press release says that that fact is true "on a weight for weight basis," but also admits that it could be misleading. There's also some discrepancy about the differing vitamin C levels in the concentrate versus the diluted product. On a personal note, I was a Ribena drinker for a while. I think it's tasty stuff. I don't think I ever believed it was good for me, however.

Nutritionists and researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston set out to try and discover whether dairy foods in general had any effect of fertility on humans, as there was "pretty strong evidence" that an excess of lactose in animals could have a negative effect on the ability of females to conceive. Everyone was surprised to find that the same result was not found in humans. The records, taken from 1991-1999, of nearly 19,000 women from the ages of 24-42 were examined.

It turned out that they found that women who ate two or more servings of low-fat/non-fat dairy foods and no whole fat dairy had an 85% higher risk of becoming infertile. Eating one serving of whole fat dairy per day significantly reduced the odds of developing infertility. The type of infertility most commonly found in this study was anovulatory, a failure to produce eggs. One possible reason for this result is that low fat dairy foods tend to have more lactose in them than full fat products, but scientists say that more research is needed before anything can firmly be concluded. And they do "not recommend that women trying to conceive use this as an excuse to eat "buckets and buckets of ice cream."

Following right in the footsteps of Coca Cola, Pepsico has just announced that they, too, will be adding caffeine content labels to their drinks. The labeling change comes conveniently at the same time as Pepsi is changing the look of their cans in general.

With two major beverage companies on board this new labeling trend, it sets the standard for other soft drink (or "sparkling beverage") manufacturers to add caffeine amounts to their packaging, as well as just to their ingredient lists. Making this information easily available draws attention to the fact that the FDA regulates the amount of caffeine that can be added to products (.02%), as well as to the fact that there are many groups that recommend an upper limit foe caffeine consumption per day The American Dietetic Association recommends no more than 300mg per day, for example.

We don't necessarily think that caffeine will become the next "hot" issue, as there is simply too much to worry about with foie gras and trans fats at the moment, but you never know...

Diet Coke is slightly higher in caffeine than regular Coke. Both are higher in caffeine than Pepsi, which has slightly more caffeine than Diet Pepsi. Either out of a desire to get consumers to sit up and take more notice of their brand, or simply as an attempt to jump on the energy drink bandwagon, Pepsi is rolling out a new, more caffeinated, diet "sparkling beverage." The new soda is called Diet Pepsi MAX.

Pepsi MAX is a diet soda that has been sold outside of the US for almost 15 years, so the fact that the name of the new drink is extremely redundant (a diet diet soda?) shouldn't be entirely confusing because US consumers aren't that familiar with it. The drink is sweetened with a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium, both artificial sweeteners, and will contain roughly 5.95 mg of caffeine per ounce of liquid. This puts at a much higher level than Diet Coke (3.8mg) and regular Diet Pepsi (3.0mg), and in the ballpark with Coca-Cola Blak (5.75mg) but not as high as Enviga (8.3mg), Red Bull (9.64mg) or coffee (13.44mg).

Diet Pepsi MAX is being targeted at 25-34 year olds and will hit stores in June

Advertising companies and politicians like to play with semantics for the purpose of changing images. Big soda companies seem to be heavily invested in changing their images this year - with Pepsi completely revamping their packaging and Coke teaming up witt Jay-Z to promote Coke Zero - so it isn't entirely shocking to hear that they no longer want soda to be thought of as "carbonated soft drinks." Instead, they're "sparkling beverages."

In what some might describe as a blending of advertising and politics, the name change represents some social climbing on the part of soda companies. They are trying to distance themselves from their high-calorie, junk food roots, which politicians and other people in positions of power continually hold against them. Unfortunately for the cola companies, soda is so popular that no matter what Coke and Pepsi executives decide to call it, changing the name for the product to "sparkling beverage" is like trying to change the word for "beer": it's just not going to happen.

We love smoothies. New consumer research shows that smoothies have been one of the fastest growing food/drink markets over the past five years, where sales have been up more than 80% to over $2 billion in annual sales. This includes both made-to-order smoothies, from businesses like Jamba Juice, as well as pre-packaged products.

There are a couple of reasons for the popularity of smoothies, but the biggest one is that they are perceived as being health-conscious, without being too "healthy." Most smoothies involve a blend of milk, yogurt, sorbet and fruits, often with additional vitamins and supplements mixed in. They aren't necessarily low calorie, but they are better for you than a double cheeseburger and fries in terms of nutritional content. Smoothies are also convenient, and their appeal as an "on-the-go meal" is one thing that has helped them become a fixture in people's busy lives. The biggest market is people 18-34, with 50% of respondents to researchers inquiries said that they had at least one smoothie a month.

To keep up the growth, smoothie manufacturers will have to look to new flavors and new twists on their existing recipes. Look for more flavors/ingredients in existing recipes, like the addition of green tea and açaí, and expect to see a wider range of offerings, from low-calorie smoothies to decadent ones, to draw in new consumers.

We've been following the Baileys Drinkable Desserts contest for several weeks now, in which both professional and amateur mixologists could put together their most inventive concoctions and put them up for public voting, with the hopes of winning the grand prize of a trip to New York City for two for a private cooking class in the Gourmet Cooking Arts Center with Chef de Cuisine, Jennifer Day. The contest coincided with the launch of Bailey's two new flavored liqueurs, Baileys Mint Chocolate and Baileys Caramel. The liqueurs proved to be good choices for baking, as well as for making cocktails, but some of our favorite entries included the Caramel Apple Pie-Tini, The Baileys Vanilla Bean and I Want S'More.

The contest just finished up and the two winners have been announced: Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake in Mint Condition (amateur, pictured) and Mocha Mint Bavarian (pro). The recipe are after the jump.

Are you a fan of Starbucks? What about Bravo's Project Runway? The coffee giant teamed up with season 3 finalist Mychael Knight to produce some limited edition, customizable coffee t-shirts that are being given away at MyStarbucksShirt.com. The site has an application that allows you to put your favorite drink combination onto a shirt, providing everyone with something that is both very Starbucks and very you.

Before you get too excited, there are a couple of restrictions on this promotion. The giveaway began on February 15th and only lasts until February 28th. A total of only 10,000 t-shirts will be given out, meaning that there is a limited number available every day and they sell out quickly! The best strategy for acquisition is to try to get online as close to 10am PST (1pm eastern) as possible, as that is when the promo "refreshes" every day with a new batch of shirts.

The combo I came up with (pictured) isn't something that I would necessarily order when I go out for coffee, but it makes for a pretty interesting shirt. What will your Starbucks shirt - assuming you are lucky enough to get one - say?