"st. louis" news and stories

The Big Springs region of the Missouri Ozarks has been designated as one of the "Last Great Places" by the Nature Conservancy, thanks in no small part to people like Nicola MacPherson. As owner of Ozark Forest Mushrooms, she's doing her part to preserve the unique ecology of the region while at the same time bringing its best culinary offerings to the masses. Her operation, run from a family-owned farm located along a picturesque, limestone ridge detour of Sinking Creek, grows shiitakes as nature intended: on logs, in the forest.

Read more about Ms. MacPherson's adventures in fungal farming after the jump.

If any city can claim to be the capital of the Fast Food Nation, it's St Louis. In a single year, the low-key midwestern metropolis gave America a slew of delicious, if devilish, treats: peanut butter, the hot dog, Dr Pepper, iced tea, cotton candy and even crunchy ice cream cones.

Each of them made their debut -- at least, in the national arena - during the 1904 World's Fair, staged in St Louis's Forest Park as a centenary celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Compared with rival Chicago's fair 11 years before, which had focused on pomp and ceremony, this was about mass marketing and shopping (one exhibition showed the time-saving tricks of cooking with the innovation known as electricity). This fair was focused on everyday innovations, so it was natural that inventiveness should stretch into food, too.

InBev of Belgium, the world's biggest brewer, is said to be preparing a takeover of Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch is headquartered in my home, St. Louis, Missouri, and has been operating here independently for 156 years. Most of us here in St. Louis have some connection to Anheuser-Busch that goes beyond their beer and the thought of losing them has us a bit worried.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently listed just some of the Anheuser-Busch related institutions in our town:

• Baseball games at Busch stadium
• Free brewery tours
• Grant's farm, a wildlife preserve owned by Anheuser-Busch where visitors can also sample free beer
• Bevo Mill - a restaurant built by Anheuser-Busch on the eve of Prohibition to make saloon-going seem more respectable
• August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area - a 7,000-acre park

My favorite Anheuser-Busch related St. Louis tradition is the free Christmas lights display at the brewery itself. It's beautiful. My second favorite (though if I liked the beer better it would be my first) is that its approximately 6000 St. Louis employees all get a free case of beer every month.

Of course, with a takeover we are worried about losing local jobs, but we are also worried about losing an important member of our community.

If you're concerned about caffeine in your diet, help may be on the way in the form of a dipstick-style caffeine test strip. Chemists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say that the product would be the first of its kind, according to a story on FoodNavigator. The test strips would be treated with an antibody, cloned from one found in llama blood, that changes color when it comes in contact with caffeine. The strips wouldn't tell how much caffeine a drink had, only whether or not it was present. The llama blood antibody was apparently chosen because it worked well at high temperatures.