"take-out" news and stories

This weekend, there's going to be a 10-foot pastrami sandwich at the Brooklyn Flea, but, despite the fast-food bigger-is-better craze, no one will dare you to eat it. This inedible behemoth is the latest structure from New York artist and School of Visual Arts professor Kevin O'Callaghan, and that meat is all rubber. That tooth-pick tassel? It's made from old menus. Your old take-out menus, in fact.

The unveiling of the large-scale piece, along with a 10-foot packet of take-out essentials (utensils, condiments, napkin), is the end of a week-long press run for SeamlessWeb.com, the international online food-delivery and takeout site. Their new campaign involves the slogan "(Less Paper) More Eat," and a big red truck circling the city to collect consumers' old menus. In exchange, you get a fortune cookie with a redemption code to use on the site's 5,000 featured restaurants in 27 cities across the U.S, as well as in London. And they've enlisted O'Callaghan to turn those paper menus into a piece of art. (FYI, he also designed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards and is the subject of the newly released book, Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O'Callaghan, which chronicles his long career.)

Geeks have a lot of street cred these days. It's their moment, you could say. They own cool grown-up toys and wear hot glasses and everyone wants to befriend them or marry them or something. And now, geeks even have their own culinary genre: geek food.

According to Urban Dictionary, geek food is considered high-calorie, often caffeinated, easy-to-make food that works with the lifestyles of techies and the like (check out this geek food pyramid). For those looking to try out some geek recipes, this Geek Food Podcast (which is sadly no longer posting) teaches everything from Donkey Kong bars to Wookies (the perfect snack for watching Star Wars). Geek food is by no means limited to sweets and snacks, though, or even to American dishes. This article on Geek Delicacies reports that sushi and various forms of take-out are absolutely within the genre.

Additionally self-proclaimed geek boyfriend informs me that pizza is another classic geek food, and that in the book Microserfs (about computer programmers), a character only eats flat foods like pizza and cheese for weeks, as these are the only foods that his friends can slip beneath his door while he works. Okay geeks, I know you are out there. It's your turn: What do you eat?

It's so exciting when carry-out pizza arrives at your doorstep, and terribly dissapointing if the pizza became smushed or the cheese slid to one side or some other disaster occurred. The Washington Post tested out various pizza parlors in the area to see which pizzas withstood the delivery process the best, and found seven that fared pretty well. Though the actual list applies mainly to those of us hanging out in the D.C. area, I'm wondering if there are any national chains notorious for delivering pizza that has fallen apart? And similarly, which service provides pizza that looks like it came straight from the oven?

For more on the Post's recent pizza kick, check out Ellen's recent post on The Washington Post in 60 seconds.

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