The NY Sun reports that with truffle prices up from about $2000 per pound to $2500 per pound, a white truffle-imbued baked potato at New York's The Four Seasons is costing haute cuisinites $200 a pop. Ah, the season is sooooo ephemeral....go ahead.
( Above see white truffles, not to be confused with knobbly spuds. Thanks to italia-online.com.)
US chip-maker Kettle Foods , based in Salem, Oregon. will be powering all its plants with wind power soon, according to the Business Journal of Milwaukee. The plant the company will be building in Beloit in 2007 will be part of this project. 
"Kettle Foods already operates a photovoltaic solar array in Oregon to generate 130,000 kilowatt hours of solar power annually at its Oregon headquarters. It also recycles its used cooking oil into biodiesel fuel. "
Pepsico's Walkers Crisps have crushed Golden Wonder, the crisp champion of Britain for decades. GW has gone bust, in part due to the powerful sales push of Walkers, currently holding a 50 percent share of Britain's 2 billion pound crisps market.
Huh? Potato chips, people. Foodie's pal Rose sent us a link to a piece in the Jan 11 Guardian recounting the history of the crisp/chip ( born in the USA) and its subsequent journey into the hearts, minds and arteries of the British public. When Foodie read the account of the potato chip's birth in 1853 in Saratoga, New York it sounded extremely familiar, even to phrasing, as well it should as Foodie wrote it somewhere, sometime. BUT, alas, the Guardian piece omitted the bit where George Crum, native American, tried to pass off the potato chip thang as his doing when in fact it most likely was his niece who did the deed, sweating over the fat vats while George took the credit.
The first Brit crisp was being sold in 1913, but the real factory variety came along in 1920 when Frank Smith packaged up in bags the potatoes his wife had peeled, sliced and fried. Smith added " a pinch of salt in a twist of blue paper," to each bag. In any event, to this day Brits love their crisps, especially cheese and onion-flavo(u)red, and many even have the palate for "prawn cocktail, Worcestershire and Marmite" chips.
We are co-founders and directors of The Potato Museum, a tax-exempt organization and its offshoot The FOOD Museum Online.
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