"largest" news and stories

Supposedly, everything is bigger in Texas and up until now, that adage has certainly held true for Whole Foods Market, which has their 80,000-sq. foot flagship store located in Houston. The company is now planning an even larger store for San Jose, California. At 86,000-sq. feet, the store will be the largest Whole Foods in the US and probably will hold the title for some time despite the fact that Whole Foods does seem to love large stores. With restaurants and spas opening inside supermarkets, what was once one-stop-shopping is now a shopping experience.

But is this getting out of hand? How large can a grocery store before it gets too big? This new Whole Foods, which will be located at the intersection of Blossom Hill Road and Almaden Expressway, will take up about 2 acres without including space for loading docks and parking. It's safe to say that it isn't exactly necessary to have a store that large, but do you prefer to seek out the biggest stores for your shopping when given the choice between a larger and smaller store of the same type?

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The largest commonly eaten nut is the brazil nut. The 4-5cm nuts grow on one of the largest species of rainforest tree, which reaches about 30–45-m tall and 1–2 m in diameter. The nuts are grown in coconut-like shells that weigh approximately 4.5-lb and contain up to two dozen brazil nuts. The coco de mer, the fruit of a palm tree grown in the Seychelles, is usually considered to be the largest nut in the world. Also grown in a coconut-like shell, the mature fruit can reach up to 65-lbs and contains several seeds, which are also the world's largest.

The rest of the world's largest nuts tend to be of the inedible variety. The world's largest pecan, for example, is located in Brunswick, Missouri and is 7-ft. high. x 12-ft. long, and weighs about 12,000-lbs. The world's largest peanut is in Ashburn, Georgia

Incidentally, the world's largest nutcracker is located in Germany. The device stands about 19 ft high and can crack any nut up to the size of a coconut (which is a drupe, not actually a true nut).

Four Italians, all instructors at a survival school, were used to dealing with harsh conditions. Among the other survival skills they had, they even had a lot of practice at building igloos, just in case they were ever stranded in the mountains and needed to stay warm to stay alive. Despite all their varied experiences, however, they weren't quite prepared to embark on their most recent challenge: building an igloo out of chocolate.

The dark chocolate structure was built for the Eurochocolate Fair in Perugia, weighs nearly 8,000-lbs and stands about 54-ft high. A regular igloo takes about 3 hours to complete, but the chocolate one took 23 hours due to the challenges posed by the material, which could both melt and crumble during construction. One of the builders said that it was "much more difficult than building a normal snow igloo," although the working environment in an air-conditioned room was probably a little more plesant than a snowy mountaintop.

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If you ask me, creating giant foods just once to get in the record books is getting a little old. However, a pizzeria in Pennsylvania is hoping to set a record by making their giant, 150-slice, 3' by 4.5', $99 pizzas for anybody that wants one. Known as The Big One, this gigantic pizza from Mama Lena's Pizza House in the Pittsburgh suburb of McKees Rocks uses 20 pounds of dough, 15 pounds of cheese and a gallon of sauce, according to a recent AP article. The current record holder, a pizzeria in Iowa, has a pizza with specs about half that size. Mama Lena's has sold about 10 Big Ones in the last year.

[Photo: Gene J. Puskar - AP]