coffee

• Free Coffee: 1908 | Shorpy I’m guessing no WiFi. ;) “A line of unemployed men drink free coffee at the Bowery Mission in New York City on Jan. 2, 1908. The long table is covered with cups.” (tags: coffee 1908 history photography )

Obviously, I’ve managed to get to the Bizarro Universe.

There is no small amount of humor in the idea of McDonald’s revising itself in what amounts to the image of the company that did for coffee what McD’s did for hamburgers.

A New Coffeehouse Look for McDonald’s?: A three-week-old McDonald’s in Saratoga Springs is a prototype for a new upscale, Starbucks-like redesign for the chain that could be making its way around the globe, featuring ‘trendy, upholstered booths, a stone fireplace, and comfy lounge chairs. Gone are the iconic Golden Arches. Instead, there’s a short, modern sign on a tuft of grass outside. Instead of a cardboard cutout of the ‘Hamburglar’ next to the counter, there’s a bowl full of Granny Smith apples and a glass display of salads. There are warm tones of sage green and brown, not the traditional bright yellow and red.’

(Via Serious Eats: Features, Videos and Required Eating.)

In reading up on the cuisine of the Mediterranean, I’ve been looking recently into what is, as the cliché goes, the most important meal of the day — a cliché, but one that is consistently echoed by nutrionists and diet gurus. Unfortunately, it is also disappearing in much of Western society.

The definition of breakfast is easy enough, but what is eaten differs quite a bit across cultures. The Wikipedia article on Breakfast offers some interesting details for across the world, including a brief passage on the Med.

In much greater depth, and much more interesting for my purposes, was this 1997 Nutrition Today article by Louis E. Grivetti: Mediterranean patterns and summary - Morning Meals. North American and Mediterranean Breakfast Patterns, part 3.

Over the past few years as I’ve been spending much more time paying attention to my diet, I began eating breakfast again after having given up on it most days apart from a cup of coffee. It was amazing how much better the day starts off when some actual calories were floating around the system, not to mention how many fewer feeding frenzies I engaged in at the end of the day.

Of late, breakfast has consisted usually of an English muffin, toast, or a bagel (no condiments) with a big glass of water and a cup of coffee. This is similar in pattern to at least one of the cultures mentioned in the article above — the traditional/typical Italian breakfast of cappucino e brioche. Good stuff.

Who knows if such stats would make a difference, because some people aren’t ever going to get it.

WorldChanging: The Food Less Traveled:

When I tuned into NPR in Sunday, the weekend quiz show was broadcasting from Iowa. The host asked listeners to call in with an answer to the question: “How much money would go back into the Iowa economy if all Iowans ate their daily recommended allowance of fresh fruits and vegetables from local sources?” The answer? Approximately $300 million. That’d be an enormous economic boost for the state, simply for choosing local produce, with the obvious personal payoff being fresher (and thus presumably tastier) food….