Edible Junk: real stories about fake food

The one nice thing about being a student is the attrocious diet of trans-saturated garbage and alcohol. I remember when the CBC's Street Cents did a scientific analysis of Cheese Whiz to determine if it were food, or just melted orange trash bags. As it turns out it's actual cheese.

Pringles in the UK recently came under the same scrutiny. What surprised me wasn't that people couldn't tell if Pringles counts as actual food, but that the Procter and Gamble (the parent company) was pissed to find out it was. Turns out, P&G were kind of hoping their crispy tube snacks would be scientifically labelled as some kind of fried-preservative novelty snack rather than actual food so they could avoid an avalanche of UK taxes. Also turns out, that pringles are made of 42% potato, and thus, counts as a potato-based chip.

Around the world, parents send their children "care packages" loaded with fresh undies and comfort foods. In Japan they love to include copious sugar-fried study fuels, so Nestle jumped on board with the Japanese postal syste to create mailable Kit Kat bars with inscription areas and a space for postage. The candygram won the Media Grand Prix at the recent Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Kit Kat in Japanese is Kitto Katso, and it means "surely win".

What I'm not clear about is what the other 58% of Pringles are made out of (recycled bike spokes or something) and how you get a Kit Kat through the mail in a country as hot as Japan without making those fresh undies look like the morning after.

TrendFlogging: Reinveting Street Meat > Tweet Mobbing for MexiKorean Taco Goodness

Long story short: Los Angeles restauranteur and entrepreneur Roy Choi started Kogi, a mobile Korean Taco business. At first people flashed more gang signs than money at him, but what started very slow as haute-cuisine in a cube van quickly spawned a cullinary monster.

Choi's secret recipe: a small, dedicated customer base + word of mouth + twitter = mucho dineros. (ammendum: Roy Choi was also featured on reality cooking show, Top Chef, so work minor celebrity status into the formula there)

By the time Newsweek caught up with him he was catering to crowds as strong as 600 and having L.A.'s Finest policing the crowds and traffic he spawns. All this takes is a single tweet announcing the expected arrival time of one of his trucks outside a busy L.A. bar.

Food trucks are nothing new, and taco trucks certainly aren't uncommon in L.A., but Choi has reinvented the model. By adapting social media, Kogi is essentially America's first "viral restaurant", and the real excitement comes from businessmen from as far away as Korea coming to America to study how the basic coffee truck model became an experiential phenomena, to one day unleash their own clone armies. I say let them try. The only real question is whether this will prove to be a localized fad like pop-up retail, or ground zero for a brand new business model for fast food in the future.

I'm happy to vote with my stomach.