Brewing illegal whiskey in a bathtub out back is so eighty years ago. These days, backyard stills in California are much more likely to be turning stolen restaurant grease into barrels of bootleg biofuel. Now that gas prices have gone up, a car that runs on used fryer oil sounds increasingly appealing. Unfortunately, this means that grease-haulers are losing thousands of dollars a year, prompting those in the business to look into locking their trash cans. But even locked barrels of grease are disappearing into the gas tanks of Californian cars. It's no wonder, considering that the price of soybean oil has tripled in the last three years. The liquid dripping off your French fries has never looked this good....
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Italian consumers associations are asking their countrymen to boycott pasta today in a largely symbolic effort to draw attention to the rising costs of noodles. As is the case with most of these food-price stories these days, biofuel production is being blamed for the high cost of durum wheat, more of which is being diverted into ethanol-making. Says the BBC: "Pasta is a national dish in Italy, with each Italian eating on average 28 kg (62 lb) of pasta every year." And perhaps the most apt analogy was the one I just heard on BBC World Service radio: "An Italian without pasta is like an American without hamburgers." Photograph from iStockphoto.com...
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