Yule Heibel's Library tagged food →  View Popular, Search in Google

Great article about restaurants/ dining out in the US. The point about food trucks, so apposite to the question of costs of leasing a "real" restaurant, is thought-provoking.
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Corollary: The food truck is your friend.

The ultimate low-rent venue is the food truck. The wide presence of food trucks in New York City, Austin, and Portland, Oregon, has greatly improved the food in those cities. No longer is street food a bad pretzel or fatty hot dog; food trucks offer diners authentic Mexican tacos, homemade sausages, dim sum, Vietnamese bánh mi (sandwiches), and hundreds of other delicacies. One of the most famous food trucks, Kogi, in Los Angeles (@kogibbq on Twitter, if you want to track it), specializes in Korean-Latin fusion food, such as its Kogi Kimchi Quesadilla, which mixes spicy, garlicky Korean cabbage with cheese in a flour tortilla.

If we want to improve American food, and make it much cheaper, we should deregulate the food trucks and the other street vendors, provided they meet certain sanitation standards. Many cities have already moved down this path, and people are not keeling over with salmonella. The next food revolution in the United States is likely to be a mobile one, and it will be advertised on Google and Twitter, not through more traditional (and expensive) ads or commercials. That’s how the low-rent food of the future is going to work.
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food restaurants food_carts rents

Super-interesting article about the growth of food trucks. And who knew that there's even a trade magazine devoted to mobile food trucks? "Mobile Cuisine Magazine" http://mobile-cuisine.com/ ??
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In fact, restaurant industry analysts say that rather than bucking the trend, brick and mortar restaurants increasingly are looking to gain market reach and heighten their public profile by putting their own mobile kitchens on the road. And retailers such as Crate + Barrel have hosted food truck nights in their parking lots on the theory that people who come out for the food may come inside to shop, Myrick says.
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lifestyle atlantic_cities mobile_food_trucks food franchises business_model

Found this via Twitter: Cost of 2,000 calories: $5 via a McDouble; $19 via canned tuna; $60 via lettuce.

calories laphams_quarterly food cost_of_living

UC Riverside scientists have a breakthrough that would allow genetic engineering to enable plants to become tolerant of aluminum toxicity. Apparently, much of the world's potentially arable land has that aluminum toxicity, and therefore can't be used for food production. Ths would circumvent that problem, and possibly signal a breakthrough into the second wave of a Green Revolution. (The first one has kind of reached its limits.)

wired_magazine agriculture bioneering genetic_engineering food crops paul_larsen

NYT article on the problems around "the other oil crisis," triggered not in small measure by our (West's) desire to circumvent fossil fuel dependence by relying on biofuels.

crops energy ethanol food fuel geopolitics oil palm_oil

"Four decades ago, Norman E. Borlaug developed a wheat variety that fed the world. Now he's battling a pathogen whose spread could cause starvation."
- for doomsday-mongers, Borlaug was the party pooper who made sure that India would be able to feed itself. Today, we need that moxie again, more so in fact, given that governments have gotten cold feet about fighting the new variant of rust disease as well as helping Africa to food self-sufficiency. We should have a Marshall Plan for Africa, plus use all the biotech and modern methods available to ensure sufficient food, but it's not coming together.

africa agriculture food mit_techreview norman_borlaug wheat world_hunger