food

I've been eating a fair amount of food on the go this week. Not fast food, mind you, catered food--like food-in-a-box type food: little lunches supplied in clear little boxes (something akin to what might be served on an airplane flight), complete with plastic knife and fork. Or rather, I should say, complete with barely effective plastic knife and fork.

I've always hated disposable cutlery. The knife doesn't cut and the fork doesn't do whatever it is that a fork is supposed to do. It's only through intense trial and error that I am ever … Read more

OK, I take back everything I said the other day about the Mini Fridge-Warmer. Or rather, I take back half of the things I said about it. Specifically, the half extolling the virtues of having a portable food warmer plugged into my car for road trips. It seems there is a better way to cook food on the go.

With the In-Car Microwave Oven I can cook whatever want, whenever I want, wherever I want. Suddenly I am free from the tyranny of once-cooked foods. Now, with this mini-mic if I want to heat up some soup or cook a … Read more

In the spirit of breathing new life into old gadgets, as well as creating the nerdiest breakfast tool ever, designer Chris Dimino managed to make a typewriter into a waffle maker.

The Corona-Matic Waffle maker (which is currently only a prototype) not only produces an extremely large, rectangular, and potentially delicious waffle. Since it's made from an old Corona typewriter, it imprints a keyboard shape into your breakfast food.

The product was spurred by a challenge from Dimino's art school, the School of Visual Arts in New York, to take a "useless product" and make it … Read more

I like it. I like it a lot. It's a fridge. It's a food warmer. It's a Mini Fridge-Warmer from Think Geek. As the name implies, this combination appliance can cool down drinks or keep lunches warm. With a temperature ranging from 44 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, this dual-purpose fridge is sure to keep you cool...or warm...or somewhere in-between.

The Mini Fridge-Warmer boasts a 20-liter capacity while maintaining a relatively small footprint. It reaches a height of about 17 inches, and the base of the appliance holds its footprint down to a little larger than … Read more

There are just three simple instructions for finding local restaurants with Urbanspoon for iPhone and iPod Touch, an application developed by the makers of Urbanspoon.com:

Step 1: If you're one the iPhone, let the app use GPS to pinpoint your location. If you're on the iPod Touch, tap the button to enter your city.

Step 2: Vigorously shake the device up and down like you would a blocked-up ketchup bottle. Or simply press the "shake" button.

Step 3: Watch the application's slot machine wheels spin as Urbanspoon settles on a cuisine, price range, and … Read more

The Appliance and Kitchen Gadgets blog strives to be about more than just what new tools you can buy. We were struck by Steve Boggan's recent article for the Guardian, which reminds us that new food technology can affect us, even if we don't want it to.

A new word popping up all over the place is nanotechnology. There is nanotechnology research into all sorts of things, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, military intelligence and weaponry, and now, even food. But as Boggan explains in his article, this is a revolution that has met simultaneously with generous praise and severe criticism.

This is not surprising, considering the potential fruits of this technology: scientists are boasting that using nanotech in foods could completely change the way we think about food. Using nanotechnology, foods like burgers and ice cream could be changed on the atomic level to taste just as good without the fat or the calories. Boggan's article also mentions how nanotech might provide protection against allergic reactions. He writes, "If you are allergic to peanuts, perhaps you'd like to fix your food so that any nut traces pass harmlessly through your body."

Many so-called "nano-futurists" predict a future where nanomachines in food will supply farmers with information about each plant in a crop, shoppers with information about the ripeness of a fruit, and crops with pest-specific smart pesticides. … Read more

Ah, the beautiful people. Stylishly waving their finger food rings around whilst delicately balancing the perfect canap?. Champagne glasses reflect off of the crystal chandelier above, bathing the fancy party-goers in intricately refracted light. Yet amidst the swirl of delectable excitement, a small group huddle in a corner, obviously too uncouth to join in the festivities. It is not the garish party hats perched upon their heads that has banished them, nor is it their propensity to wear leisure suits to black-tie affairs. No, it is their greasy fingers and crumb-crusted attire that give them away as the boorish step-cousins … Read more

For those of us who have a hard time deciding what to eat or where to dine out, Urbanspoon has made a slot machine/roulette application (complete with 'pull' slot machine sound effects) to help us make a decision on where to eat. The application will determine your location from the GPS feature (which is still a pretty marked and powerful feature to the iPhone 3G that invariably raises privacy issues) and you can select he criteria you want, i.e., neighborhood, cuisine and price. And, for some inexplicable reason, you literally shake the phone to activate the selection feature. … Read more

Demand for biofuels in Europe and the United States has forced up food prices 75 percent around the world, according to a World Bank report that was leaked and published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

The number stands in sharp contrast to the 3 percent contribution to higher food pricing estimated by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, a study commissioned by food manufacturers pegs the contribution of biofuels on food prices at between 25 percent and 35 percent. (Click here for PDF).

The reports will surely heat up the debate on biofuels policy one week before the … Read more