"trends" news and stories

As we near 2011, restaurant chains have some menu scrunching to do. With consumers increasingly demanding to know what's in their food and federal menu labeling regulations coming into play, restaurateurs will have to bridge the gap between informative and appealing.

To see just how chains may be affected, Nation's Restaurant News has rounded up "5 Trends for a Post-Menu-Labeling World," taking cues from a new report from Mintel, a Chicago-based market research firm. The report, titled Mintel's Menu Insights, includes a survey showing that "62 percent of consumers say they plan to eat more healthfully in the upcoming year, but many complain that healthier food doesn't taste as good without the added sugar, sodium and fat."

In response, Mintel predicts that restaurants will shuffle in some "better-for-you ingredients" to dishes consumers already like. Something to keep in mind, they say, is exemptions. Mandates to post calories do not include limited-time offers, so watch out for those belly-busting seasonal treats -- dare we say the McRib?

Food & Wine released its new iPad app last week (YumSugar had the scoop on release day, October 7) and, aside from a few complaints about download time, it's been well received, including by those of us here at Slashfood and KitchenDaily who've had a chance to play with it. The free app includes redesigned features from the magazine, recipes (with gorgeous photos for each) and videos with celebrity chefs such as Mario Batali.

Easy to navigate, with multiple ways to delve into each topic, the app makes it fun to flit around the issue. I especially like the Buying & Pairing Guide, which has various ways to explore 100 bottles of wine, with photos of each bottle, info about the region, grape and producer, and a recipe suggestion for each bottle (a $9 Merlot to drink with Easy Short Ribs Braised in Red Wine).

Food writer Regina Schrambling says she's finally found a phenomenon even more annoying than Rachel "Yummo" Ray: Precocious kiddie foodies.

Writing in Slate, Schrambling points to some of her main offenders: New York Times' fawning coverage of 12-year-old "restaurant critic" David Fishman, the Times' new "Cooking With Dexter" feature written by food editor Pete Wells about his kitchen exploits with his 4-year-old son, and NPR's 5-year-old Chef Julian, the world's "youngest celebrity chef." These kids are not just being cooed at for their cuteness, she says, they're actually being held up as inspiration for adult chefs.

Schrambling claims that A) Kitchens are not nurseries - they're dangerous places filled with knives and boiling oil - so we encourage kids to cook only at the peril of their forearms and fingertips, B) Kids have less-developed taste buds, naturally craving high levels of salty and sweet, and therefore are less likely to come up with anything truly remarkable to adult palates, and C) The younger you are, the smaller your food memory bank, so a 5-year-old is probably not going to know a "good" burger from a "bad" burger.

"On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness," Schrambling writes. "...Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller."

I find over-precocious kids annoying in general, and I think that any parent who holds up little Ava or Aidan as a paragon of culinary sophistication is totally silly. At the same time, I think it's great for kids to get in the kitchen and learn a thing or two about food. Better than sitting in front of the X-Box eating Cakesters (I'm sure Schrambling would agree). And if having a few kiddie chefs on TV helps encourage a greater respect for food, that's great. Though I'm unlikely to be trying out any of their recipes any time soon.

Source

You might think that a goofy internet meme about a football-sized lump of bacon might be worth a few blog posts, maybe a newspaper article about all the blog posts, then a swift plunge into the cold outer darkness where D-list reality TV contestants from 1998 and the band that wrote "Turning Japanese" live in eternity.

Well, according to Eat Me Daily, the creators of the "Bacon Explosion" are instead getting a six-figure book deal. The forthcoming book, "Barbecue Makes Everything Better," is based on the BBQ Addicts website.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the Bacon Explosion. Excuse me, I'll be in the kitchen baking a wedding cake with house-cured lardo icing and candied pancetta roses for my upcoming cookbook "Say it With Pork: 101 All-Pig Recipes for Your Special Day."

Source

Sodexo, a company that provides food services to more than 600 college campuses in the U.S. and Canada, has just released some of their long-term data monitoring taste preferences over the decades. Check out the list of students' favorite dining hall foods from this year, compared with the list from 1989. The results are pretty interesting.

Favorite foods in 2009:

1. Locally-grown fruits and veggies
2. Crispy garlic-ginger chicken wings
3. Mac 'n five cheeses
4. Vietnamese Pho
5. Green tea and pomegranate smoothies
6. Crab cake sliders
7. Mini samosas
8. Tilapia Veracruz
9. Goat cheese salad
10. Chicken Molé

Favorite foods in 1989:

1. Fruit and cottage cheese plate
2. Chicken nuggets
3. Turkey Tetrazini
4. Chicken Chop Suey
5. Egg, bacon and cheese English muffin
6. Half sandwich and cup of soup
7. Taco bar
8. Spanish beef and rice
9. Vegetarian bean chili
10. Algerian lamb stew

The "fruit and cottage cheese plate" strikes me as particularly '80s (this was the decade of aerobics and leg warmers, after all), and the "chicken chop suey" is as retro as it gets.

For those of you who got to partake in the delights of college dining hall fare, please spill - what were your favorite dishes?

Source