MakeUseOf: The 9 Best Recipe Organizer Apps to Replace Your Cookbooks. “Recipe managers can help you find, create, and keep recipes in a single place. You can even save handwritten recipes without typing them in one by one. The following are some of the best recipe organizer apps for Android and iPhone that will make you want to do away with your cookbook altogether.”
New York Times: Cooking Online, Arab Women Find Income and Community. “The kitchen, historically the symbolic heart of domesticity in the Arab world, has often kept women tethered to household responsibility, and out of the work force. Only about 25 percent of women in the Middle East participate in the labor force — the lowest such figure in the world, even as female university graduates in the region often outnumber their male counterparts. But the rise of social media platforms, YouTube in particular, is changing the power dynamic for Arab women, allowing them to turn the kitchen into a source of income and influence.”
Salt Lake Tribune: Intermittent fasting may lower your risk of dying from COVID-19, Utah study finds. “Utahns who practice intermittent fasting — as prescribed by Latter-day Saints — have potentially been unknowingly lowering their risk of suffering severe effects from COVID-19 infection. That’s the conclusion of a study by doctors at Intermountain Healthcare.”
New York Times: Family Recipes Etched in Stone. Gravestone, That Is.. “At his home in Washington, D.C., Charlie McBride often bakes his mother’s recipe for peach cobbler. As he pours the topping over the fruit, he remembers how his mother, aunts and grandmother sat under a tree in Louisiana, cackling at one another’s stories as they peeled peaches to can for the winter. Mr. McBride loved this family recipe so much that when his mother, O’Neal Bogan Watson, died in 2005, he had it etched on her gravestone in New Ebenezer Cemetery in Castor, La., a town of about 230 people.”
Washington Post: One woman dominated a local fair’s food contest. The internet went looking for her.. “The competition at the Virginia-Kentucky District Fair began innocently enough when a woman named Linda Skeens entered her many baked treats, canned goods and other items for the judged contest. Then she won — and she won huge. The fair posted a list of winners on Facebook showing that Skeens dominated the June 13 competition, winning more than 25 of 80 contest categories. That’s when things took on a life of their own. Her online fans wanted to find her.”
BBC: Borsch soup in Ukraine added to Unesco endangered heritage list. “The UN’s cultural agency has added the cooking of borsch – a soup usually made with beetroot and potatoes – in Ukraine to its list of endangered intangible cultural heritage. Unesco said the war in Ukraine had ‘threatened’ the cooking of borsch.”
CNN: ‘I’ve never experienced pain like that’: Influencers recount harrowing experiences with Daily Harvest crumbles, blast company’s handling of recall. “Instagram-friendly meal kit service Daily Harvest is facing a firestorm of online backlash over the voluntary recall of one of its products, after a slew of people who consumed it reported becoming ill with mysterious symptoms, including extremely elevated liver enzymes. The direct-to-consumer brand has long utilized a network of online influencers to promote its products. Now several influencers, who say they were sickened, say the company’s lackluster handling of the crisis is putting new responsibility on the influencer community to warn the public.”
German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment: Now also online: The BfR World Food Safety Almanac. “‘Safer food, better health’ – this is the motto of the fourth World Food Safety Day on 7 June 2022. Fittingly, the World Food Safety Almanac of the Germany Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) goes online. The online BfR World Almanac provides an overview of the administrative structures of various countries in food and feed safety.”
Google Blog: ¡Que aproveche! Spain’s culinary heritage. “Food is at the very heart of Spanish culture, with traditional recipes being passed down from one generation to the next across the nation’s regional communities. It’s a fragile heritage though, and one that can be easily lost in the rapid pace of today’s world. To preserve this heritage, Google Arts & Culture, working with curator and gastronomic researcher María Llamas, and the Real Academia de Gastronomía, presents Spanish Food: Cooking Memories. Following on from Spain: Open Kitchen – our first-ever virtual exhibit about food culture – this is the second installment dedicated to Spanish cuisine.”
Digitaltrends: Snapchat now has restaurant reviews. Here’s how to view them. “On Friday, Snapchat announced a new map layer it has added to its existing Snap Map. The new layer was created in partnership with The Infatuation, a restaurant review site. Basically, the layer shows you recommended restaurants that are closest to you. With the new feature, you can view restaurant reviews from The Infatuation about the restaurants around you, save them to your favorites, or share them with your friends.”
Chemical Watch: Database reveals vast numbers of food contact chemicals not on radar. “Following a systematic review process, the scientists from the Food Packaging Forum (FPF), with help from Swiss and US academics, selected information from over 1000 published studies measuring chemicals in food contact materials (FCMs) and articles, including processing equipment and tableware. The resulting database, FCCmigex, contains many food contact chemicals (FCCs) for which little is known about use and migration into foods.”
Northeastern University: Has Your Food Been Chemically Altered? New Database Of 50,000 Products Provides Answers. “In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Food, Giulia Menichetti, senior research scientist at Northeastern’s Network Science Institute, demonstrates that the concentrations of different nutrients in food follow a fixed pattern, and that the amount of any given nutrient in a food follows a similar mathematical formula. Inspired by these findings, her team determined that 73% of the U.S. food supply is ultra-processed, which they link to a higher risk of developing a variety of health issues. Their findings, which showed the level of processing for over 50,000 foods sold in the United States, were published in an online database for public use.”
Flinders University: Food cyber attacks forecast. “Wide-ranging use of smart technologies is raising global agricultural production but international researchers warn this digital-age phenomenon could reap a crop of another kind – cybersecurity attacks. Complex IT and math modelling at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, Aix-Marseille University, France and Flinders University in South Australia, has highlighted the risks in a new article in the open access journal Sensors.”
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: FAO unveils new public tool based on agricultural census data. “The new domain allows rapid access to knowing how many farms exist in a given country, what their sizes are, the tenure typology determining its ownership, the farmer’s gender, and how many people live and work on them, all sourced to national Agricultural Censuses.”
British Library: Picture Perfect Platinum Jubilee Puddings on Wikimedia Commons. “The UK Web Archive is looking for nominations for websites to be archived to a special Jubilee collection that will commemorate the event. You can nominate a website using this form here. Inspired by the Platinum Jubilee Pudding Competition, in Digital Scholarship we are encouraging you to upload images of your celebratory puddings and food to Wikimedia Commons.”
