Welcome to Food Week January 3. 2025 and welcome to the New Year. Many, breezy stories this week with an emphasis on healthy and unhealthy foods (and drinks) to inform your 2 week commitment to lifestyle changes. Enjoy!
MACRO
- Interest rate cuts have stalled and the mortgage rate is creeping up. Investors are beginning to become a little jittery about 2025.
- Robert Kennedy and Elon Musk are in conflict about the best way to deal with obesity.
- The Surgeon General is calling for a cancer warning on alcoholic beverages, following the lead of other countries.
RETAIL AND CONSUMER
- GLP drug use caused a 6% reduction in grocery spending. But big Junk Food is developing new strategies.
- Canadian flavored potato chips invade.
- Kroger is 150 years old, which is pretty impressive for any retail establishment let a lone a dynamic chain.
- Coffee prices are soaring; here’s why
- Cooking Beef Bourguignon at home.
- Your kitchen will no longer be white.
RESTAURANTS AND FOODSERVICE
- French Toast sliders from White Castle sound pretty good.
- The highest and lowest quality chicken. Although I will take issue in the low ratings Popeye’s receives. Its basic concept is excellent. But the variation from franchise to franchise is remarkable. Go find a good one.
- More about El Califa de Leon – the taco stand with the Michelin Star.
- Food Tourism appears to be dead as cuisines globalize. The first of these was Chinese, thanks to some perverse incentives in the US.
- Follow Discontinued Foods on Bluesky so you know what you have been missing.
- What restaurant servers notice about you right away.
FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN
- Dock workers at East Coast ports vote to delay strike until January 15. While not as food intense as the West Coast, it still can drive the prices of certain foods higher
- Using ingredients and product composition to inhibit listeria.
- California moves to ban polystyrene foam.
- Micro-plastic contamination is showing up in all kinds of food. Now available in dolphins!.
- Wine makers increase yields by growing vines under solar panels.
DRINKS
- Perhaps come February you should have a gin and tonic instead of a glass of wine.
- The death of World of Beer, It is a symptom of the jaw dropping crash of beer in general. Also, why non-alcoholic beers are so expensive.
- A paean to Frankie’s Tiki Room, a Las Vegas favorite.
- A Modern twist on the classic Airmail.
- Buckfast is a Benedictine Monk’s brewed version of a Red Bull and Tonic, with an alcohol and caffeine punch that is getting people in Scotland in trouble. And across the Irish Sea, another causer of trouble has re-emerged: poitin.
- The science of why drinking makes you feel worse when you are older.
FOOD WEEK January 3 LAGNIAPPE
- Unpopular food opinions. Most of these say more about the eater than the food but I will say that crab is better than lobster and it isn’t even close.
- The difference between ginger beer and ginger ale.
- Amazingly, 40% of US produce in 1944 for came from Victory Gardens.
- 11 food trends for the coming year. And 10 weight loss tips for the new year.
- Food Inflammation myths.
- The most vegetarian countries.
- Coffee grounds can make concrete 30% stronger.