Food news antipasto

It’s hard to top a post about JELL-OMETERs, but here’s what I dug up this week. We will start with a feel-good story about a fast food employee. Jaydon Cintron, a Chick-fil-A worker in Kinston, North Carolina, found $10,000 in two bank envelopes in the men’s restroom. Instead of pocketing the cash, he turned it in to his human resources department, who tracked down the owner. At first Cintron refused the $500 reward he was offered, but eventually he accepted it, saying that he was just “in the right place at the right time.” A similar scenario happened to me in the early 1990s, and this story is a good reminder that no matter how messed up things get, that there are always good people in the world.

Members of Rancho Gordo’s Bean Club are in an exclusive group, and the owner, Steve Sando, wants to keep it that way. Rancho Gordo is sending out cease-and-desist letters to other companies that also use the term ‘bean club‘. The reason for this is because the company holds a federal trademark for the phrase, and if you don’t defend your trademark you can lose it. Critics say the term is too generic to be trademarked, but they will be fighting an uphill battle since the trademark has already been issued. However, there is precedent for overturning a trademark – Taco John’s lost its fight for the term “Taco Tuesday” a couple of years ago.

In the world of apples, there always seems to be a contender for the next Honeycrisp. The latest entry, coming (not soon) to a store near you, is called Sunflare. Usually I take these proclamations with a grain of salt, but when I read that it was developed at Washington State University by cross-breeding Honeycrisp and Pink Lady apples, I sat up straight because Pink Lady is my all-time favorite apple. This could be a great new variety, but we will have to wait a few years to find out. The apple isn’t expected to be in grocery stores until 2029.

Food follows fashion, in that what’s in style ebbs and flows over the years. What is trendy today will be passe in a few months or years, but after a sufficient amount of time has passed, people will look back and “rediscover” something from a previous era. Drinks writer Mina Holland says that it’s time for a tipple that saw its prime more than 50 years ago to return to the spotlight: cream sherry.

Many EYB Members love Emiko Davies, the food writer and photographer who lives a dream life in Tuscany and has written several bestselling cookbooks. Earlier this year she penned a post on her blog titled “Why we need cookbooks now more than ever”, which I did not see until SBS Food mentioned it in a recent article. Davies explains why recipes are more than just ingredients and directions, and why artificial intelligence is never going to be able to replace human-generated recipes that are rooted in a place and steeped with human emotion.

Other articles of interest:

• Watch it wiggle
• Meet Ravenous, a new food website
• Fortnum & Mason Awards shortlist announced