"eater" news and stories

If you've ever wanted to learn how to write about food and turn that knowledge into a career, then Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) has introduced just the thing for you. They've created the Center for Food Media, which offers a range of professional development classes dealing with food and media.

The Center for Food Media offers classes on all aspects of food writing (recipes, blogs, restaurant reviews), food history and pop culture, podcasting, and food styling. You can also learn about writing cookbooks and how to deal with agents, and how to be a TV chef. Coming next year will be classes on wine writing and recipe testing. Classes start at $75 (for a one session class), which is a quite reasonable amount to learn some things that should help further your career.

[Via Eater]

Even before Chowhound became a part of the Chow network, users frequently had problems with deletions. Controversial posts and less than glowing reviews of certain restaurants were deleted without explanation and some users found that their posts were deleted with a high frequency, regardless of the topic. Since the message board is a public forum, it is perfectly appropriate for moderators to remove offensive content, but when non-offensive reviews of "off the table restaurants" and other posts relevant to the website were taken down without explanation, many users grew frustrated. The problems persist with the new Chowhound, leaving many former contributors to head to different, more open minded, websites.

It appears that Eater is one such site because they have just offered to post anything that has been inexplicably removed from the Chowhound site. They are able to do this because the "offending" posts are not removed from the Chowhound feed as quickly as they are from the site, so there is a window of time where it is possible to retrieve the posts. Of course, you will have to contact the staff to let them know if your post was stricken, but it will be interesting to see what types of pieces are selected for removal.

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In the Krystal Square Off III World Hamburger Eating Contest in Chattanooga, Tennessee this past weekend, Takeru Kobayashi brought home another championship title by eating 97 hamburgers in 8 minutes. Joey Chestnut came in second, finishing with 91 hamburgers, followed by Patrick Bertoletti in third with 76. All the numbers are up hugely from last year's contest, in which Kobayashi narrowly beat Chestnut with a final total of 67-62 burgers. One other big change from previous years was that the contest was televised on ESPN2, which gives the sport a much wider audience and much more publicity than it enjoyed before.

The contest is known as the "square off" because the burgers that the competitors wolf down are square, but Krystal's burgers hosts the contest because they have been holding eating contests at their stores since the first one opened in 1932. According to company legend, the tradition was set when the second customer challenged the first customer to a head-to-head hamburger showdown.

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The folks at Lenny's, er, Denny's, surveyed hundreds of late-night eaters a few months ago. Some of their findings are available at Restaurant News Resource. The survey defined late-night eaters as folks dining out between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. on a weekly or monthly basis.

For the most part, the trends in responses aren't anything too earth-shaking: most of the people surveyed were out for typical American food like burgers and fries. I was a little surprised that only 6 percent said they were out late at night for dessert, however. I'm not totally clear on just who Denny's surveyed, but aside from the Slams and skillets, some folks said they wanted things like fried tofu and goat's milk. To those of you in front of the refrigerator drinking goat's milk from the carton at 3 a.m., you are not alone.

In Japan, one of the hottest stars in competitive eating is Natsuko "Gal" Sone, a cute, bubbly young woman that is known almost as well for her unusual makeup (which includes white eyeliner) as she is for her eating skils. Her nickname comes from her style of dressing in the gyaru or "gal" fashion, with dyed blonde hair. She is one of the relatively few female competitive eaters and seems to be the highest ranked one at the moment, with victories in contests involving seafood, curry and hamburgers, among other things, and for participating in a number of regular eating contests on Japanese TV. Her eating quirk is that she actually seems to be a very picky eater and takes her own container of mayonnaise, her favorite condiment, along when she eats to put on just about everything.

In the clip after the jump, you can see a Japanese television show follow her throughout the day as she consumed 40,000 calories. If, like me, you don't speak Japanese, you'll find the popups on the show very helpful, as they show the measurements (weights, etc) of the foods that she eats and keep track of the calorie count.

[Thanks, Mark]

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