Top 10 Places to Learn to Cook the Local Cuisine | Lonely Planet
There’s always ten, no? Anyway, kind of a fun list if you’re into cooking or just looking for a little local flavor (terrible pun very much intended).
Traveling with the iPhone | Foodspotting
The featured iPhone App in the iTunes store this week is something called Foodspotting, and looks to be the perfect tool for all those people who love to take photos of everything they eat at restaurants and share them with the world. Admittedly I am not one of those people, but I’ve spent enough time here on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter to know that there are plenty of food porn photographers out there.
Obviously it’s rather easy to snap a photo of a delectable dish and share it immediately with whatever social network you prefer, but Foodspotting (for which there is a corresponding website) takes the whole experience a bit further - creating a community for foodie photographers and combining it with a sort of Yelp-like service of local discovery. This combination of social and location makes it a handy travel app, allowing users to both acknowledge all the cool places they’ve eaten around the world as well as tap into the foodie community to find local joints that serve up tasty treats.
10 Great Places for Local Wines | USA Today
The USA Today looks beyond Napa (and most of the rest of the West) to highlight some unexpected American wine regions.
8 Most Exotic Cocktails in the World (and How to Make Them) | Tripbase
Do you really need to take an actual vacation when you can tour the world through exotic cocktails and escape from all your problems (at least until the morning when the hangover sets in and all of your problems become demonstrably worse)?
15 Best Food Markets in the World | Travel Answer Man
For the foodie traveler, the Travel Answer Man lists some of the best destinations around the world.
Thinking about food, some times it’s good to have some perspective. Consider the obesity problem in the United States. There’s little question obesity, particularly among children, is a significant concern. I fully support the many efforts being made by concerned citizens to combat the problem, particularly those focused on improving the health standards and quality of food in our public schools. Still, I can’t help but recognize one thing…
We’re concerned we’re getting too fat.
This strikes me as a good problem to have. I don’t mean to belittle the issue. We could all benefit from eating healthier, exercising more and generally being more physically fit. It would go a long way certainly in reducing diabetes and preventable health problems associated with being overweight. Still, our grave concern is that we have access to too much cheap food and drink. That much of the cheapest food available to us is unhealthy is problematic assuredly. But is this not primarily an issue of finances, lifestyle choice, physical disposition, and, to a certain extent, poor government policy, rather than some endemic crisis?
Consider that hundreds of millions of people around the world do not have access to adequate drinking water. Perhaps a billion. Many, if not most, of these are children in Third World countries whose lives are disadvantaged from the start and who are likely to suffer malnutrition, disease and even death just because they can’t get something we not only take for granted but rarely think about at all and routinely waste. And there’s nothing they themselves can do about it. Now that is a crisis.
I realize this cries of “there are starving children in China, now finish your plate” but when I think about this grave global problem, well, I guess it’s hard for me to get too distraught that our kids eat too many Big Macs.
In honor of this tumblr I just discovered, a picture of tonight’s dinner: salmon steak glazed with lemon and honey and other stuff. I really don’t know; I abandoned the recipe and just started winging it.
Sometimes it’s good to be back in California.
Catching up on some reading while I was away
I don’t read as much as I used to. Well, that’s not right exactly. More precisely, I don’t read as much for pleasure as I used to. I imagine I actually read more than I ever have only it tends to be generally work-related which is always useful, sometimes enlightening, and quite often dull. What free time I have that could otherwise be dedicated to reading more personal things - novels, non-fiction, essays and articles - is spent instead meandering about outside or sitting braindead on the couch in front of the television. It’s sad. I was an English major in college which by definition means I read fiction a great deal, some of which I actually enjoyed.
When I travel on business I try to dedicate the time sitting in airports and on board planes to catching up on good books left unread on the shelf and magazines I don’t subscribe to but should. I like to choose books that are somehow relevant to wherever I’m headed; if I find myself up in Monterey maybe Cannery Row. I like to mix it up between new books I’ve heard are good and old ones I should have read already.
As far as magazines go, I’m a fan of Esquire because it generally offers interesting articles by writers I admire - like Chuck Klosterman, for example. Plus a healthy portion of the magazine is given over to pictures of pretty women in various states of undress. Feels like a win-win. Atlantic Monthly is another; few magazines feature the kind of in-depth reporting this old codger manages each month, and none on such a wide-range of interesting topics. I also typically grab an issue of The Economist because just cracking one open on a flight makes me feel smart and elitist.
Anyway, on my recent trip East, I managed quite a lot of just this sort of thing. So here goes.
