World Cup Cuisine

by Erik Olsen on

Oh, hey, and while I’m posting about the World Cup, let me draw your attention to a nice entry over at Slashfood about food and eating at the World Cup.

The post calls out a piece in The Guardian wherein you will find a food guide to the 12 cities that will play host to the tournament. German cuisine is pretty good. Why, just this weekend I was in Brooklyn and had myself a very tasty schnitzel.

But we’re talking here about more diverse foods than that. For example, treat yourself while there to a little brezen, buttered pretzels filled with salami or cheese. Or the more gustatorily ambitious can sample a tasty saumagen, or pig’s stomach filled with potatoes. Yummy.

World Cup Tickets on Ebay? Beware

by Erik Olsen on

We’ve done our mightiest to alert you, dear gadling reader, to the coming joy, thrill and mayhem promised with the start of the World Cup, the largest sporting event in the world. Amazingly, countries across the globe will relentlessly tune in on the Web, TV and by smoke signals to watch their favorite teams kick a little checkered ball around a big field, and fall down and flop around like girls given the slightest little kick in the shins. Well, for those interested in attending and who believe they might be able to pick up a few tickets on Ebay, think again

According to this piece, the Germans are saying that tickets for the month-long tournament starting June 9 are personalized with the buyer’s name. They will NOT be transferable, say officials, except under special circumstances. All this for security reasons.

So what that means for folks who want to pick up some tix on the Internet, you are perhaps gambling with a lot of dough. (on Ebay’s German Web site the top bid for a ticket for Brazil versus Australia on June 18 was $551). And if you think the Germans are going to be lax about their security apparatus, well, you probably don’t know much about Germany. So caveat emptor, folks. 

 

Top Beers

by Erik Olsen on

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: Hmmm, beer.

Yes, I love to sudsy stuff as much as the next guy, but like my relationship with coffee, a foodstuff about which I declare with pride that I am a bona-fide snob, I am also very particular about the kind of beer I drink. None of that watery belly wash Budweiser for me. nah, I’ll take a Bass or a Sam Adams or a Guinness that I have to cut with a knife before I’ll touch the domestic blue-collar stuff. Sorry. As I said, I am a snob.

And so for other snobs out there I offer a must have list of what are said to be the finest 100 beers in the world. The list is put together by Beer Advocate magazine, a fine source if ever there was one…better anyway than, say, Teetotaler Magazine or Mormons Weekly. As you might have guessed the majority of the brewski here are made overseas, Europe in particular, but there are some American bottles on the list, including the Dreadnaught IPA, which gets a 93 rating.

I know you’re going to find this list useful, so print it out.

Caffeine Dipstick?

by Erik Olsen on

If there’s one thing I’m passionate about, food and drink-wise, it’s coffee. A while back I ruminated on the state of things coffee-wise and determined that coffee is pretty much the magic elixir of life. No surprise there. I am, of course, talking about caffeinated coffee. The stuff with a jolt, with guts, that puts hair on your chest. The decaf stuff, well, what’s the point?

Well, a St. Louis chemist named Jack Ladenson is interested in the subject. He says that when some pole ask for decaf, they get the real thing, and that can be bad. Myself, I look at it the other way. The I’d be pissed if I got handed decaf when I was expecting the real thing. So he’s gone and patented a dipstick that’s whether there’s juice in your java. Just stick it in your drink and it changes color, depending on the amount of caffeine. Sounds like a good idea, but it seems there’s not much of a market for it. Want to hear more? Listen to this NPR story.

The Perils of Bottled Water

by Erik Olsen on

Nearly every third world country I’ve ever visited, I’ve noticed that litter is a problem. Actually litter is the wrong word: refuse pollution might be a better term. I’m looking for a word or phrase that sums up the horrible, wretched mess that is made when a million/billion-strong mass of humanity dumps its garbage around without having a sensible public policy for cleaning it up. You know what I’m talking about. And when you look at all this refuse, you usually notice that one type of item predominates: the water bottle. It makes sense, of course. The water in many big cities and in other countries around the world is unhealthy. The first thing you learn when you go to a place like is “don’t drink the water.” But it turns out that this may not be true. Well, perhaps it is for , but it might not be for other big cities.

A fascinating new report from the EPI shows that bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, and yet it can be as much as 10,000 times more expensive. Not just costly in a strict dollar sense either. As I mentioned above the pollution problems associated with bottled water put a heavy strain on the environment. And its not just the litter quotient, either. When you add up the energy it takes to MAKE these bottles, why, things get even worse. It’s a fascinating look at a common problem that is not particularly well addressed, I don’t think. How to convince people that their water is safe to drink from the taps? We drink the water here in New York, at least we put it through a filter and drink it. But I’d probably still have a hard time drinking water out of the tap in any place other than, say .