"rodents" news and stories

Food is like fashion: full of trends that are hot plates one moment and cold leftovers the next.

Sure, there are fundamentals that will never go out of style, like a well-cooked steak or a creamy bisque. But then there are fads -- Chilean sea bass, sous vide, molecular gastronomy. Like fashion's flashes in the pan, some are gaudy extravaganzas meant to attract attention and instant gratification. On the other hand, some become classics passed down through generations to come. No one can truly predict what the public will embrace, either in the short or long term.

What does the future hold for food trends? What exciting, silly, over-the-top surprises await us tomorrow, besides jet-pack pizza delivery? Drool over these epicurean prognostications and tremble at our ability to peer into the unknown. Here are food trends that we 110 percent guarantee will be served at any point between this new year and 500 years from now.

Mice love cheese, no matter what its form.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., cheesecake institution Junior's, founded in downtown Brooklyn in 1950, prides itself as "New York's Best Cheesecake," but it's now scrambling to clean up its reputation after photographs posted on the Internet over the weekend show some rodents enjoying a snack in the bakery's window display.

If you think about it, there are a lot of things that when described with different words or to anyone who isn't familiar with them, are kind of unappetizing. Raw fish? Fish eggs? Near-raw bird livers? What about Bambi? Bugs Bunny? Sushi, caviar, foie gras, venison, and rabbit. They don't sound all that unappetizing to me, except the caviar and foie gras, of course.

What about "rodents?" Apparently, in a region of Venezuela, rodents are a true delicacy. In other South American countries, capybara, the world's largest rodent (does this make anyone else think of The Princess Bride?) is hunted for its hide. In Venezuela, the meat of the capybara can get prices that are almost double that of beef. Part of that price is how difficult it is to hunt the capybara, and part of it is the flavor, which is "more like rabbit than chicken, though when dried with sea salt in Venezuela it acquires a fishy flavor."

Hey, as long as we don't start making sewer rats a delicacy here in the US, fine by me.

More on, uh, rodents:
Peruvian Cuy to debut in a store near you
Nutria, the other white swamp rat
Cooking with groundhogs