(Almost) Free Ice Cream

Baskin Robbins is honoring America's Firefighters by selling ice cream for $.31 cents per scoop on Wednesday, April 30th between 5 and 10 pm.

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The Face of the Global Food Crisis: Liberia

An interesting article from the BBC News discusses a change in the traditional Liberian diet, as global rice prices have soared.

Standing behind the wooden counter of his roadside restaurant, Emmanuel Biddle heaps piles of Liberian-style bolognese onto the plates of customers.

When the Liberian chef first added pasta to the menu of his traditional chop house, he didn't expect much success.

But as surging rice prices threaten to halt progress in fragile countries like Liberia, local people are changing life-long habits and switching to cheaper staple foods such as spaghetti.

Liberia imports 90% of its rice from Asia and the US.

The story reports that the price of rice has more than doubled in the last six months, making it unaffordable for many ordinary Liberians. Restaurateurs who serve jollof rice, a traditional West African dish, have been suffering.

Viola Nelson charges customers $2 for a plate of jollof rice, but she says she barely covers her own costs.

"I'm not making a profit these days. I should be raising my prices but I don't want to lose any more customers. If the food crisis gets worse I will be left with nothing," she says.

At the buzzing Old Road Market on the outskirts of Monrovia, the price of a 50 kg bag of rice has shot up to $34.

A crate (40 packets, which provides a similar amount of food to 50kg of rice) of maize or millet-based spaghetti, imported from the US, is sold for $12.

Rice vendor Augustus Geepo, perched on a pile of unsold bags, says sales have dropped dramatically as a result of the food crisis.

A year ago, he could easily sell 40 bags of rice a day. Now he is lucky if he shifts 10.

What's your thirst worth?

If you've been following the news lately, you've likely heard about the skyrocketing prices of grain and other crops and the severe food shortages in places like Korea and Haiti.

But you may not know that your favorite frosty beverage is also imperiled. That's right... a beer famine might be next, according to environmental experts. Climate change is affecting barley yields, and is already threatening the Australian beer industry.

But the problem is not limited to Australia. Growing demand for biofuels and a poor harvest have already increased malting barley prices in the UK, according to the British Beer and Pub Association, and a shortage of hops is increasing the price of a pint in North America as well.

We're already living in a world where a gallon of gas costs nearly $4, which is now the same price as a loaf of organic bread. A gallon of organic milk is nearly twice that.

So what's a little liquid relief going to cost now? At the Whole Foods Market Bowery Beer Room in New York, draught beers range from $6.99 to $13.99 for 64oz. The Heartland Brewery serves 23oz. draughts for $8.50. A 6-pack of 12 oz. bottles of Amstel Light at D'Agostino's is up to $9.99.

Why is my cheese crunchy?

A chemistry lesson, courtesy of The Kitchn:

Ever wonder about the whitish spots of crunch in your cheese? People have a wide variety of theories on those little crystalline bits. No, it's not salt, it's not something deliberately added during cheesemaking, it's not that the cheese is old and it's starting to dry out, and it's not a cheese mite. Today we're setting the record straight in a big reveal of the little known component in some of your favorite cheeses.

Those bits are called tyrosine, and they're actually amino acid clusters that form with age. Tyrosine clusters are signs of a well-aged cheese, which is why you'll find them in some of the world's most loved cheeses like Parmigiano Reggiano, aged goudas, and mountain cheeses like gruyere or Pleasant Ridge Reserve. Tyrosine is a non-essential amino acid found mainly in casein, the dominant protein found in milk. The word itself is from the Greek tyros, meaning cheese.

What's most fascinating (from a dorky cheese fanatic perspective) is the reason that these protein clusters form. When cheese is made, fats and proteins are trapped within chains of proteins that have bonded together during acidification. Groupings of these fats and proteins make up the solids, or curds, that form cheese. When cheese spends a long time aging, these protein chains begin to unravel, leaving small, crunchy deposits behind. Tyrosine lends a distinctive textural charm to cheese, and is a welcome interruption within the body of an otherwise smooth paste. And sometimes it even compliments the beverage you may be drinking with your cheese, as in the case of pairing a full-bodied stout with a super-aged cheddar; the crunchiness of the cheese somehow matches the fullness of the beer by contributing its own textural intensity.

Tyrosine is not to be confused with the crunchiness you can find in some washed-rind cheeses. Since this category of cheese is usually washed in some kind of salt water brine, residual salt crystals are often left behind on the crust of these cheeses. When you take a bite of rind and inner paste together, the crunchiness from the outside can be mistaken for existing on the inside. Now go and impress your cheese-loving friends with your new vocabulary word!

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Water. The New Wine?

Have you ever wondered what the most expensive bottled waters in the world were? I didn't think so... I wouldn't have thought that many people would spend much time thinking about it, but I always forget how many people there are with more money than brains.

Michael Mascha hasn't forgotten. In fact, he wrote a book called Fine Waters: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Most Distinctive Bottled Waters. The book, he says, introduces people to "the epicurean delights of water."

Bottled water is the next wine, Mascha tells Forbes Traveler. Like wine, he says bottled water has terroir, or a sense of place.

While this insanity rages, charity: water is trying to raise awareness about the lack of safe drinking water in so many parts of the world. They've released a fairly provocative PSA produced by the director of Hotel Rwanda. The video, embedded below, shows a mother in New York City walking to Central Park with a jerry can to collect water from the lake, just as millions of people in the developing world do every day.

Not a drop to drink

Who needs horror films when reality is this scary? The above clip comes from a movie called FLOW: For Love Of Water. I don't know whether people will see this movie and, even if they do, whether it will make an impact. But it's another resource to add to the list of "things that are running out."

Just today, the news came out that a number of city restaurants are banning bottled water. "It takes 41 million barrels of oil a year to make, transport and refrigerate water bottles," the New York Post article, reports, and "a crushing 30 million plastic water containers end up in landfills each day."