Entries tagged with 'The Year That Was'
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Continuing The Year That Was with a remembrance of some wonderful people who left us in 2008. Sadly, we said goodbye to some wonderful folks in 2008: Jean-Claude Vrinat, Herb Peterson, Robert Mondavi, Frederic J. Baur, George Carlin, Sherry Cermak, Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes, Don LaFontaine, David Foster Wallace, Robert Steinberg, Paul Newman, Carmen Rocha, Lou Dorfsman, Briana Brownlow....
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Continuing The Year That Was, with food-based pixelated distractions. Super Mario Bros. Cupcakes. Photograph from hello naomi on Flickr OMG. How many food video games came out this year? Major League Eating was announced in early March, teased us in April, still hadn't come out in May (when we sent Ben Brown to a press event in San Francisco and Gordon Mark to one in New York), and finally came out via WiiWare on July 14. MLE was perhaps the most inspired of this bunch of games, which also included Iron Chef America, Cake Mania, and Hell's Kitchen (which Gordon Mark, who sort of became our de facto in-house food-gamer, reviewed here—and a whole host of others we've probably overlooked....
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I thought we could get through all the thematic Year That Was posts yesterday, but we actually have MORE today. So here, for your daily video fix, another trend that had us food-lovers all agog in 2008—stop-motion food videos. Stop-motion films are nothing new, but looking back in our video archives, we were surprised at just how many food-related herky-jerky shorts we blogged in 2008. So, what does food do when you're not eating it? The magic of stop-motion animation showed us that chocolates hearts fall in love, chocolate bunnies fall in love, slabs of meat fall in love, cupcakes dance, and Cadbury Creme Eggs commit suicide. And sometimes the food did nothing so grand as get eaten by something...
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More in The Year That Was. Video game characters bento box from Anna The Red Food that looked like other stuff turned out to be a theme of 2008 on Serious Eats and on other blogs. Plain loaves and rolls were apparently boring. Baked goods with more interesting shapes, like piggies, bunnies, lobsters, and mummies ruled the day. Similarly, people transformed plain cupcakes into popcorn, poodles, nursery rhymes, and corn on the cob. Bento boxes were everywhere, getting facelifts as popular album covers, video game characters, and Sanrio characters....
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This probably should have been in the Media entry, but whatevs. The Year That Was continues. Top: Wallace and Gromit as bakers in "A Matter of Loaf or Death." Above, clockwise from left: Amy Adams, Julie Powell, Meryl Streep, Julia Child. Nominated for five Oscars, Ratatouille wins Best Animated Feature category. A movie based on the Julie/Julia blog-book is announced, with noted foodie, author (Heartburn), and director (Sleepless in Seattle) Nora Ephron at the helm. Our own Ed Levine gets a part as an extra and has dinner with Ephron after his scene wraps. Martha Stewart claims the movie is about her! Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to be made into a movie. New Wallace & Gromit movie, A...
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OK, I promised you at the end of the previous Year That Was post that I'd do something a bit more fun. Does this qualify? Outer space alone is vast, mysterious, and profound. But once humans start putting things in space, the concept goes from sublime to ridiculous at light speed. I mean, monkeys? Pigs? Food? Yes, food. In 2008, space got spicy with kimchi. A new ringed object was spotted when bagels went up on a Space Shuttle mission. We found out that outer space smells like steak. And the Japanese made space beer. And, oh yeah, this weird space food sticks video made the rounds on all the blogs. Yes, food brings space absurdity to a new level....
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It's an old trope that the only people who care about media news are members of the media themselves. And while we are a "blog," we do indeed consider ourselves part of this illustrious and infamous industry. So please indulge our navel-gazing here in this installment of The Year That Was. In the interest of getting this particular retrospective over with in one shot, I'm going to lump many different media fields together. Newspapers and Magazines ©iStockphoto.com/ideabug It was not a good year for newspapers in general, with several dailies reducing frequency and coverage, going web-only, and even filing for bankruptcy. It's no suprise then that newspaper food sections were also downsized accordingly (and Serious Eats readers were a mixed...
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Continuing The Year That Was with some of the more downer news of the year. Food Shortages: Worldwide hops, butter in Japan, pork in Turkey, snails and oysters in France, water in European olive oil producing countries, bananas in Japan. Even Stephen Colbert and John Stewart weighed in on the global food crisis. The eight world leaders meeting for the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan, scarfed a six-course lunch and then an eight-course dinner before discussing the world food shortage situation. Rising Food Prices: Paul Krugman told us that rising energy prices was just one of the many factors contributing to rising food costs. The rising cost of popcorn made movie tickets more expensive. Cereal boxes shrank but prices did...
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And we continue The Year That Was with some of our favorite food videos of the year. Each weekday around noon ET, we try to bring you a fun, short video you can watch covertly at your desk or while taking a break at home. These are roughly in chronological order, except for the first few, which were true standouts—at least in my book. Cutest Video of 2008: Pig in Boots Most Bizarre: How Bread Was Made In The '80s Most Unexpectedly Charming: Larry King and Snoop Dogg at Roscoe's Most Curmudgeonly: Andy Rooney Opens His Mail, Reveals Cereal Preferences Watch CBS Videos Online...
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Continuing The Year That Was are our favorite food-science stories from 2008. Things Scientists Made Test Tube Meat! Wired covered a three-day meeting of the In Vitro Meat Consortium in Ås, Norway, detailing the possibility of test tube meat. Cheaper to produce and more environmentally friendly, in vitro meat production may arrive in grocery stores within 5 to 10 years. In response, PETA announced a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." An "electic tongue"! Spanish scientists developed a portable "electric tongue" that can identify wine characteristics. Sunscreen for fruits and veggies! Sunscreen isn't just for sentient beings anymore; now...
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