The NYTimes Magazine teaches you about the farm bill, agricultural subsidies, and obesity:

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Via Tyler Cowen

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Food, Incentive Centered Design
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From the second best Jewlicious post I’ve read this year:

The Jews, the perennial fly in history’s ointment, have never been able to resist the impulse to sabotage a good thing. We ruined a rich Egyptian tradition of public works projects by letting a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment lead us, as one might expect from a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment, straight into freedom at the heart of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. We managed to improve on that enormous step sideways by sticking around for forty years because the whirling column of flames we were worshiping at the time didn’t appreciate artistic self-expression. We managed to let two perfectly good commonwealths get destroyed, the second time by a gang of sheet-wearing bathhouse enthusiasts. We nailed someone who was by all accounts a pretty nice guy to a stick. We called in a few favors from the countries we owned through our control of global banking and brought the proud German Empire to its knees - which, I remind you, did not turn out well for us.

The next paragraph is even better. After that, it degrades into an announcement for a blog that’s all about Humus. If he had quit at paragraph 2, it might be my favorite post of the year.

And for those who don’t know, Fuul is one of the most disgusting things on earth. It’s an Egyptian dish that resembles shit and tastes only slightly better, eaten for breakfast and every other meal. Why any rational human being with a choice would subject themselves to it is beyond me.

Categories: Food, Funny, Jewishness
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Searching around, my little brother found out that my favorite restaurant in DC may be shutting down:

Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed — there’s dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade’s original plate glass is patched and seamed — its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city’s more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.

DC has a strong waffle culture, but not much in the way of pancakes (I’m yet to find any outside of a chain). Luckily, the Waffle Shop makes waffles good enough that I don’t mind. I introduced my siblings to it during Dworins4Darfur, and now they’re hooked on the place too. If you’re in DC, get over yourself and visit one of the city’s best hole-in-the wall eateries before the last vestige of good breakfast disappears from the city forever.

Categories: America, Ephemera, Food
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