American Comfort Quilt, on sale at the Citizen's online store. $4,900
Happy Birthday America! We're taking the weekend off, see you back here on Monday morning. In the meantime, here are some America-related posts from our archives:
As part of MTV's international brand refresh that's rolling out across 64 of its channels, they've posted a series of beautifully-rendered on-air identity animations, including this one that uses candy, titled "Sweetheart":
The video »
Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats. Images via adsoftheworld.com
The ad campaign by Bloom advertising in Ireland for Pat the Baker (Ireland's champion baker) uses portraits made out of toast of William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Says the ad: "The toast of Ireland."
Full size versions »
Here's the trailer for The Informant, Steven Soderbergh's film that has a chubby Matt Damon playing an informant helping to uncover a major price-fixing scam at ADM (Archer Daniels Midland): "Corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other." It's a Big Ag caper-comedy-spy movie.
The video »
Image via muccadesign.com
We're sort of loving Mucca Design's packaging design and cheeky copy for the newly-opened gourmet store Brooklyn Fare. You may already be familiar with Mucca's work — examples include the branding and logo design of Keith McNally's Balthazar and the recent website and logo redesign of MenuPages.
The work for Brooklyn Fare is a full-on identity: packaging design, custom typeface, copywriting, even interior signage and t-shirts (in all it uses only four colors). The packaging "talks" to the consumer using a witty tone, playing on tired cliches, and we're especially fond of the coffee cup sleeves that poke fun at Starbucks, saying, "It's a medium not a grande" and "It's a small not a tall." Suck it Starbucks!
Mucca Design, in their own words, plus a video showing off the goods »
Here's the music video for "Scrumdiddlyumptious," a track by the electronic artist Pogo out of Australia, in which the audio is built using small sound samples from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with the video basically doing the same thing, elevating it to a joyous and jittery candy-flying-everywhere-celebration. Candy!
The video »
Last night on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert "wagged his finger" at Representative Cynthia Davis who opposes subsidized lunches for low-income children during summer break with the reasoning that "hunger can be a positive motivator."
Colbert more or less nails her to the wall:
Who's looking out for Representative Davis? Could it be that she's never risen above the State Legislature because she developed the anti-motivating habit of eating? We must help her folks. People of Missouri, if you see Representative Davis at a restaurant or at a hot dog stand or even through the window of her own dining room, do the right thing and take her food away.
The video »
There have been many website-to-book deals, and it looks like we'll soon be able to add Fancy Fast Food to the list. Fancy Fast Food, the white-hot Tumblr blog that conducts extreme makeovers of fast food to make it fancy-looking, that only has five posts, tweeted that they were offered a book deal from HarperCollins. Innocent tweet or a calculated move to start a bidding war over publishing rights?
HarperStudio, an imprint of HarperCollins, you may remember, gave This Is Why You're Fat their book deal.
Nothing definite yet — we'll let you know.
At the Fancy Food Show, we couldn't help but be impressed by the display for pizza in a cone by Coneinn, that pronounces itself to be "a new way of eating." If we are to believe Coneinn, the future is now, and it is cone-shaped.
Based out of Spain, the land of pizza experts, Coneinn's got big plans, with a range of products from the retail frozen variety, to indoor and outdoor trolleys, to glass display cases a la 7-11, to the holy grail that is vending machines. We didn't get to taste the pizza cones because they didn't bring any actual product to the Fancy Food Show, but we can only imagine the hot molten lava that is a cone full of pizza and cheese.
But we did pick up a pamphlet, and beyond the charming Engrish that promotes the "pleasant and acceptable smell and taste" of the Coneinn pizza cone, we learn of the six varieties: ham, ham and mushrooms, vegetables, margarita, tuna, and most bizarrely, four cheese, made from Emmental, cottage cheese, mozzarella, and blue cheese.
For home use, the Coneinn pizza cone comes with a cardboard stand that allows for easy microwaving, taking only two to three minutes to cook, or, alternatively, you can toss it in the oven for 20 minutes.
Photos, action shots, the vending machine, and a promotional video »
view larger. Photos via ibelieveinadv.com
Here is a series of posters by Scholz & Friends for the International Society For Human Rights, on occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, that imagines birthday cakes smothered on the faces on some of the world's most notorious dictators: North Korean "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Incisive and celebratory!
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Robert Mugabe »
With beach season upon us, there's nothing we'd rather be doing than reading about other people eating, cooking, and talking about eating and cooking. We polled some of Eat Me Daily's contributors and friends, asking them for a list of their own gastronomic required reading that doesn't require kitchen proximity. We divided them into three categories: Culinary Anthropology, Memoir & Fiction, and Readable Cookery. Collect them all!
Culinary Anthropology
Much Depends on Dinner, Margaret Visser (buy on Amazon
)
This is the book that eradicated the last worry for me that food was not a noble enough profession after leaving the NYTimes the first time. Canadian “anthropologist of everyday life” Margaret Visser had a brilliant concept: Take one classic meal and riff on the ingredients historically, mythologically, nutritionally and every which way from Sunday dinner. Corn, salt, butter/margarine, chicken, rice, lettuce, olive oil, lemon juice and ice cream are examined with scholarly intelligence and writerly flair. Amazing read. She was Pollan before Pollan (certainly Pollan before Bittman).
–Regina Schrambling, Gastropoda
Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky (buy on Amazon
)
If not the first book to take a sweeping look at the entirety of the world through the prism of a single item, it's certainly the best. Kurlansky's take on the story of salt is riveting, epic, human, and the epitome of the "___: A Natural History" genre — don't even bother with any of the other variations on this theme out there (tea, tuna, steak, orange juice, what have you) until you've read this one — though fair warning, it might ruin you for all the others.
– Ed Baker
Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany, Ben Schott (buy on Amazon
)
Ben Schott's second volume of miscellany offers kitchen wit and wisdom, baroque measurements and menus, feast days and famous last meals, and that's on just one page. 49,938 words, from absinthe to zoo eating, encompass enough cocktail party banter to last you through Labor Day. And as the book was published back in 2004, there's no reference to bacon or mixology, the molecular or organic, bloggers or foodies, so you'll have something almost original to say or Tweet all summer long.
–Adam Robb, The Life Vicarious
Keep reading »
