Recently in Food Category

If you're a woman of a certain age, better think twice before you down that sweet potato souffle on Thanksgiving! Or, for others I know: Better have seconds!

Check out the last line of this amazing article about the Ultimate Twin City, Igbo-Ora, Nigeria, the self-proclaimed "Land of Twins."

There is hardly a family here without a set of twins," said community leader Olayide Akinyemi, a 71-year-old father of 12, as he settled a dispute between two neighbours.

"My father had 10 sets, while I had three sets. But only one set, a male and a female, survived," he said.

The town's high incidence of twins has baffled fertility experts -- underscoring a more regional twin trend and an array of elaborate African rituals around them.

The rate of identical twins is pretty steady throughout the world at about 0.5 percent of all births, according to a 1995 study by Belgian researcher Fernand Leroy, who has worked extensively on twins.

But West Africa bucks that trend, particularly with a much higher incidence of fraternal, or non-identical twins than in Europe or Japan. That is especially true, experts say, amongst Nigeria's Yoruba community which is largely concentrated in the southwestern part of the country where Igbo-Ora is located.

Overall, almost 5 percent of all Yoruba births produce twins, the Belgian study said, compared with just around 1.2 percent for Western Europe and 0.8 percent for Japan -- although fertility drugs in the developed world are changing those figures.

Yam consumption may be one explanation for Africa's largesse, some West Africans and Western experts believe. Yams contain a natural hormone phytoestrogen which may stimulate the ovaries to produce an egg from each side.

The biggest crisis in the entertainment business that you've never heard of, and may not even care about, is the crisis of finding circus acts. This problem has fascinated me since my year as a circus clown some years back. One huge problem is that Eastern European countries had state sponsored circuses, and that supply has mostly dried up with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Cirque du Soleil mostly trains its own, but now it's having problems filling unique slots, which explains why more and more if its shows have boring, same-y acts, more like visual wallpaper than memorable show stoppers.

As Cirque du Soleil rolls through its 23rd year and prepares to expand to 22 shows by the end of 2010, from 14 today, it has become one of Canada’s marquee cultural exports and a $620 million–a–year business. Cirque du Soleil shows will appear in 24 countries this year, drawing nearly 10 million people.

Scouts like Ms. Giasson will travel the world, scour the Internet and vet thousands of unsolicited applications to fill 500 new roles. In their quest, they have created a database of 20,000 potential performers. Among them: 24 giants (including a Ukrainian who is 8 foot 2), 23 whistlers, 466 contortionists, 14 pickpockets, 35 skateboarders, 1,278 clowns, eight dislocation artists and 73 people classified simply as small.

But a problem arises when talent is truly unique and either difficult or impossible to replace. If, for example, one enters the words "giant" and "opera" into the database, only one name pops up: Victorino Antonio Lujan, a 39–year–old Argentinian who stands just shy of seven feet and weighs about 400 pounds.

Benoit Laroche, a casting adviser in Montreal, ran across Mr. Lujan taking up two seats at a circus in Buenos Aires in 1999. Mr. Laroche asked him whether he was an artist, thinking he might be a circus performer. "He said, ’Yes, I am an opera singer,’" recalls Mr. Laroche, who knew instantly he had found a potential star.

Still, it took six years before Mr. Lujan ended up in a show, paired with a diminutive soprano.

Working with such singular talent forces Cirque to walk a tightrope. The artistic side is always looking for new acts. The business side wants to make sure they aren’t irreplaceable.

I've wanted to try this restaurant in Chicago ever since my friends at GOURMET announced last October that it was the best in the country. Now, a devastating article explaining how its master chef has tongue cancer:

A year after chef Grant Achatz opened Alinea here in 2005, Gourmet magazine named the restaurant the best in the country, and the prestigious Mobil guide gave it its highest rating of five stars. The young chef's exotic, lavishly presented creations -- a mango duck dish is served on a deflating pillow that releases lavender-scented air -- have connoisseurs lining up to book meals that cost an average of $240 a person.

But last month, doctors gave Mr. Achatz, 33 years old, devastating news. A cancerous tumor was growing inside his tongue. The disease was so advanced that three doctors told him the only way to cure it was to cut out part of his tongue, leaving one of the world's most celebrated chefs to ponder life without the ability to taste.

"I was just in disbelief," says Mr. Achatz (pronounced ACK-etz). There are about 35,000 cases of head and neck cancer a year in the U.S., and most afflict older people and smokers. "I've never had a cigarette in my mouth in my life," Mr. Achatz says.

Speakinf the GOURMET's annual Restaurant Issue in October. I have a piece in this year's edition about a week I spent recently parking cars in L.A.: The Secret Lives of Valet Parkers.

When I went to Iraq a few years ago for WHERE GOD WAS BORN, I drove from the Garden of Eden and Abraham's birthplace in the extreme south of the country to Nimrod and Nineveh in the extreme north. Now, of course, Western journalists never travel this route. I also ate in restaurants, frequently, though in some of the more dangerous places we sent our driver out to bring food back. Now, that's not even possible. My friend Jane Arraf, who's covering the war for NBC, posted this extraordinary piece over at gourmet.com about what it's like trying to find food in Baghdad.

The last time I went to a restaurant in Baghdad was more than two years ago. I didn't know then, of course, that it would be the last time. I don't remember what we ate, but I do remember my Iraqi hosts becoming increasingly nervous when a suspicious-looking car kept circling the restaurant. A lot of the restaurants are still open, but it's become too dangerous for westerners to go to them. Like most news organizations, we're based outside the Green Zone, and it's even become too dangerous to send Iraqi drivers after dark to pick up food. So for dinner, when we're not putting together stories for the Nightly News, we take turns cooking. Kiko makes silken green curries and ethereal cakes.

Apart from the curry spices and chocolate brought in people's suitcases, a lot of the food we eat comes from the local market. When we were able to go out and do our own shopping before the war and for a while after, one of my favorite things to do was buy field greens there, often sold by the women who grew them. I never knew what a lot of the greens were, but it didn't really matter — they were wonderful. Now, our drivers shop for us, although for safety reasons, they don't go out to buy food every day. The fruit and vegetables grown in Iraq are organic by necessity, and the lamb and beef are from butchers who display the meat hanging from hooks in the windows. You can always find tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, potatoes, and onions — staples in Iraqi cooking — at sidewalk vendors, who cover the produce with burlap soaked in water to keep it cool. Those vegetables don't wilt in the sidewalk stalls the way that lettuce does when it's 130 degrees in the summer. When it's hotter than 130 degrees, it's difficult to find lettuce.

I recently got into a little back-and-forth with Mrs. Feiler Faster over whether it is OK to give children iced tea. Now comes word that a teenager in Britain actually overdosed on coffee. Obviously this is an extreme example, but if I, as a grown man, feel the effects of a few M&M's eaten at midday that night when I try to sleep, doesn't caffeine affect children?

A teenage waitress overdosed on caffeine after drinking 14 shots of espresso.

Jasmine Willis, 17, could hardly breathe and was taken to hospital with a high temperature and heart palpitations.

She had drunk almost three times the recommended daily amount of caffeine in just four hours.

Miss Willis, a student, was working part-time out in her father Gary's recently-opened sandwich bar after sitting her GCSEs.

She began her coffee binge last Wednesday after getting only five hours' sleep the previous night.

"I decided to have a double espresso to perk me up," she said. "It did the trick so I had one after another and they seemed to be working. I felt great - as if I could take on the world."

By noon she was feeling unwell and crying and laughing uncontrollably in front of bewildered customers.

An important milestone in my house last night as Mrs. Feiler Faster kindly admitted that I've been predicting the backsplash against bottled water for over a year now. No use linking to all the posts I've made about this subject....

The wonders of the blogosphere being what they are, a huge debate has erupted over at a post I made last week called "Steak Mate," about women who eat meat to help catch a man. Here are some my favorites:I...

I confess that back when I first started dating Mrs. Feiler Faster I was wholly turned off by the fish-and-salad routine at dinner. Okay, fine, I get that people don't eat meat for all sorts of valid reasons, but I...

The backsplash is growing!PepsiCo Inc. will spell out that its Aquafina bottled water is made with tap water, a concession to the growing environmental and political opposition to the bottled water industry. According to Corporate Accountability International, a U.S. watchdog...

The bottled-water bottlers must be feeling the heat. For newcomers to Feiler Faster, I've been on something of a tirade against the addiction many Americans have to bottled water. And it's not just because Mrs. Feiler Faster is one of...