A man in India eats rocks and bricks. Yeah, not so food-related, but pretty impressive—if it's real. (I have my doubts.)...
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The blog Oddee has a roundup of the ten most bizarre soft drinks out there. My favorite: Diet Water: "Isn't that an oxymoron? Meet the Diet Water: all the flavor of regular water, only half the calories." Also on the list: gau jal, a soft drink made with cow urine (India); a Japanese drink with pig placenta as an ingredient; and an old favorite of ours, Kidsbeer (also from Japan), which we blogged about in summer 2007....
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In the bustling North Indian city of Kolkata, it seems ironic that the two things I’m most excited about (besides the mind boggling variety of street food) are probably also the most generic items to be found: leaf bowls and terracotta cups used by wallas (street hawkers) to contain yummy goodness. These bowls and cups are disposable, biodegradable, ecofriendly, and—best of all—take the place of the nasty paper, plastic, foam, and foil stuff ubiquitous everywhere else....
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I don't know about you, but my group of makan khakis (food buddies) and I have been plenty guilty of "reverse snobbery": "Oh, no more posh restaurants bedecked in stainless steel and frosted glass," we would snivel, "Give us originality. Give us boldness. Give us fiery character and soul!" We were eager to pour scorn on cookie-cutter establishments and desperate to discover little-known, "hole in the wall" eateries. How smugly we would initiate others into the joys of roadside dining and other secret squirrel hideaways. And what a bunch of obnoxious twits we were. For my pride's sake, I wish I could claim we were on a quest for good food, nothing more. Unfortunately, we were also drunk on the...
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Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack… Watch the video after the jump. [via Neatorama]...
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Sara Rosso, also known as Ms. Adventures in Italy, recently came back from her trip to India with beautiful photos and commentary about Indian street food and Indian Chinese cuisine. Sliced ice cream, atomically spicy vegetables, mini potato burgers, fried potato balls—I crave them all. Time to get my butt to India....
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In Mumbai, India, couriers called dabbawallas are the FedEx of food delivery. But instead of jets, they deliver by train, bicycle, and foot. And forget computerized routing and tracking: They use only a simple system of color codes and numbers to shuttle an estimated 175,000 or so lunches in stackable containers called dabbas: The service is at once simple and complex. A network of wallas picks up the boxes from customers’ homes or from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals to a local railway station. The boxes are hand-sorted for delivery to different stations in central Mumbai, and then re-sorted and carried to their destinations. After lunch, the service reverses, and the empty boxes are delivered...
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