Cross Duck

"Free-range eggs" doesn't exactly mean chickens can roam freely.

Whenever I go grocery shopping, I always buy cage-free or free-range eggs, mainly because when I see the labels "cage-free" or "free-range," I imagine a bunch of chickens roaming freely in the fields and enjoying life. It makes me feel like a good person for purchasing eggs that come from chickens that live life outside a constraining cage.

However, a documentary created last year (nominated in the PBS Online Film Festival), "The Story of an Egg," reveals the truth behind these terms, which don't mean what you think they would.

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Sentient hot dogs that have sprouted appendages are my personal idea of comfort food. Wait...no. It's actually the complete opposite.

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

A lot of people have a problem with the term "comfort food." It's far too arbitrary, they argue. It changes from one part of the world to the next. Ice cream and brownies aren't nearly as popular in China as they are here. Lobster rolls aren't nearly as popular here as they are in Maine. And the term is too individual, too: One person's comfort food is another person's oddity. Macaroni salad? Fried bologna? A garbage plate?

See Also:
- Texan Concepts of Ethnic Food: Breaking It Down with Venn Diagrams
- 15 American Foods That Are as Weird to Foreigners as Poisonous Blowfish Is to Us

That the term itself is so nebulous shouldn't be a surprise: It's only been around since 1977, according to Webster's Dictionary. But nebulous and arbitrary don't mean that the concept of comfort food itself isn't well-defined.

"When people talk about comfort food, the obvious explanation is that it's all about nostalgia and missing Mommy," wrote Anneli Rufus last year in Gilt. "And really, it takes more than this to create the rush of sensations that make us feel safe, calm, and cared for. It's a complex interplay of memory, history, and brain chemistry, and while some basics apply -- most of us are soothed by the soft, sweet, smooth, salty and unctuous -- the specifics are highly personal."

In short, "comfort food" is defined as being a deeply personal ideal. But as with all matters culinary, you can tell a lot about people by the choices they make and the ideals they hold. I like that the term "comfort food" is arbitrary because that just means it's an open-ended question. Ask a person what his or her favorite comfort foods are and watch a fascinating, thought-provoking and educational discussion unfold.

Because most Americans are quick to name off at least a few of the same things when polled about their most beloved comfort food -- fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, milkshakes or french fries -- we thought it would be interesting to find out more about what "comfort food" means across the world, to seek out the foods that comfort others.

I polled a cross-section of my own foreign-born or first-gen (those raised here with foreign-born parents) friends for their answers, and you may just be surprised at the areas in which their comfort foods overlap with your own thanks to an increasingly global food community.

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Cavemen everywhere are outraged by the Paleo diet.

From eating like cavemen to redneck sketti, we're taking a look back at some of the biggest food happenings of 2012.

12. Singapore Serves Mashed Potatoes...From A Vending Machine?

The internet was abuzz when a photo of a mashed potato vending machine surfaced. Eventually, the viral picture was traced to a 7-Eleven in Singapore, where a rep confirms the Maggi-based machines are "quite popular." For just $1, you can get a healthy squirt of instant mashed potatoes and some questionable-looking chicken gravy.

We're all in.

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Photo by Dinner Series

We love Thanksgiving and its star -- the beloved turkey -- but making the perfect bird can be pretty intimidating.

But fear no more: Thanks to the gang over at the Mayo Clinic, everything Turkey Day -- from selection to serving -- has been demystified.

Check out these 10 Tips for Choosing & Preparing a Thanksgiving Bird (including an easy-to-follow carving video!):

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Photos by Katharine Shilcutt

The Kitchen Garden is the largest garden ever to be planted on the White House lawn.

Although it's not officially fall yet, plump orange pumpkins are resting on mounds of hay and dirt in and around two plots that -- along with dozens of others -- make up the 1,100 square feet White House Kitchen Garden. It's a warm day in early September and the garden is sprawled out like a sunbather across the South Lawn of the White House. You can see the mansion over a grassy hill, although the gardens are closer to E Street than they are the White House itself.

Bees from the White House's own apiary only a few feet away are dipping in and out of squash blossoms near the ground, buzzing the heads of visitors as they make their way back to the hive. The entire area is thick with the heady, horse-stall smell of mulch. On one giant thresh of tomato vines, Sungold tomatoes are hanging in grape-like clusters.

"Eat some!" encourages Bill Yosses, the pastry chef at the White House. Along with executive chef Cristeta Comerford, Yosses is leading a small group of food journalists on a tour of the White House Kitchen Garden. Everyone excitedly picks a tomato or two from the vine and pops them into their mouths, the tiny, sun-warmed tomatoes sweet like candy.

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Photo by erlin1

"Did he just order a salad?"

People can tell a lot about you in just one date. Especially if it's a dinner date. How much do you care about your appearance? Are you capable of maintaining eye contact? Do you only like to talk about yourself? Do you smell?

But it's not just first appearances, dinner conversation and the percentage of tip you leave that's an indicator of the kind of person you are on a first date. You reveal a lot by what you order, too.

Check out what your order says about you:

Hamburger & Fries

You're a no-frills kinda guy or gal. Life's a party, so why not treat it that way? You prefer to keep your problems to yourself, grab a beer with friends and enjoy your time away from the office, stress-free. Just make sure that if you really like someone, you're not afraid to open up and go deeper (that's what he said).

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Photos by Troy Fields

Whipped beet butter at Roost.

Complimentary bread service in restaurants was once as ubiquitous as free chips and salsa at any Tex-Mex spot. And it's still seen in a majority of restaurants, from fast food (free breadsticks at Fazoli's) to high end (a beautiful basket of gratis bread at Triniti).

But as former New York Times food critic Frank Bruni astutely pointed out in 2009, those slices of bread and ramekins of butter aren't as free as you think.

"Their complimentary availability is reflected in prices on the rest of the menu," Bruni wrote. "The restaurant's balance sheet and overall price structure consider the cost of all that bread, much of it neglected."

It's this latter part -- neglected -- that caused Bruni to defend the new practice of charging for bread service in restaurants. Since so many people ignore or pick at the bread basket, he reasoned, restaurants should simply charge those who want bread and reduce the overall cost across the board for the rest of the diners.

"I think of Momofuku Ssam Bar," he wrote of the iconic New York City restaurant. "On its menu, bread and butter are listed on the menu as a dish. But what you get is a terrific crunchy baguette with two exceptional butter or spread options."

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Waters has been preaching the gospel green since 1971.

Alice Waters is a modern-day icon, the mother of the farm-to-table movement and of farmers markets across the nation, the originator of California cuisine -- for better or worse -- and of the notion that eating and cooking local, organic, seasonal foods shouldn't be a socio-political issue but one of basic common sense.

So when she enters a room, looking for all the world like the benevolent leader of a benign cult in a simple, shin-length blue dress and work boots that lace tightly around her tiny ankles, people take notice despite her slight stature and unsure voice. Waters has become the Mother Theresa of food in a society that is increasingly concerned with what we're putting into our bodies, our temples.

"Eating local, organic food in season, eating with family and friends: These are ideas that are as old as civilization," Waters assured the audience at the Wortham Center last night, as if preaching an ancient religion to a new world. She spoke of her time in Paris and the cities of the Old World, in which she -- as a young college student -- experienced a "way of life that was all about touch and taste and sound."

Waters never sought out organic food or seasonal produce because of any ethical or moral commitment. Instead, she told the sold-out crowd: "We begin at a place of taste, and then we get to the politics and the food policy." Lead with your heart; the body will follow.

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Texas is ablaze today, wildfires ravaging Bastrop and threatening small towns outside of Austin. Fifty-seven fires are burning across 100,000 acres of Central Texas, and more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed since this latest rash of fires broke out on Monday. And in Austin, local bloggers are trying to do something about it.

It's a typical response from the blogger community in Austin, which is tightly knit and has always stepped up to offer support when it's needed, whether to area residents devastated by wildfires or to complete strangers like New York food blogger Jennifer Perillo.

Perillo recently lost her husband and was left with two small children to care for alone; food bloggers around the country rallied to help Perillo, including many Austin-based food bloggers like Penny De Los Santos (who is, coincidentally, in the process of moving to NYC). De Los Santos, a photographer for Saveur, is auctioning off an opportunity to go on assignment with her for a day, while other bloggers organized national bake sales and auctioned off their own high-dollar items for Perillo's benefit.

"That's how we, as bloggers, should be spending our time," said Natanya Anderson, president of the Austin Food Blogger Alliance. "To me, these are the kinds of things that show what organized bloggers can do." The AFBA was created earlier this year after local food bloggers had been spending increasing amounts of time assembling potluck dinners and charity functions along the same lines as the response to Jennifer Perillo's situation.

"We realized our collective power as a group to do good in the community could be harnessed," Anderson said over the phone last week. "There were a handful of people who had one-on-one conversations, but there's enough of us that we all talk to each other. If we did something a little bit more formal we could have a bigger impact on the community as a whole."

By this past Spring, the AFBA was born: a formal non-profit that seeks to support "each other and our community through classes, social events, and philanthropy." It's the first of its kind in the country.

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Yes, this exact thing is taking place in Thailand right now. Except not really.

The interesting thing about Google is that we ask it the kind of deeply intimate questions that we would never ask another human being, even a friend or loved one. Embarrassing questions; compromising questions; dark questions; questions that reveal our own hidden insecurities and prejudices.

It also reveals a certain hive mind tendency. Type in the very beginning of a question and you may find that Google automatically completes exactly the question you were rushing to ask. "Why are Russians so good...at chess?" How did you know I was going to finish that question with "at chess," Google?

But for each of these harmless, silly auto-completes, there are always several more that are tacky at best and downright ugly at the worst. "Why are Indians so smelly?" "Why are Irish people alcoholics?"

A vast web of stereotypes laid bare, courtesy of Google and its clever habit of transforming millions of users' search histories into one giant artificial intelligence capable of finishing your question before you can.

Of course, nearly every ethnicity, race, gender or country of origin you type into the Google search box results in the auto-complete question "Why are __________ so rude?" (Instinctive, sometimes insurmountable xenophobia pretty much always leads us to believe that every other culture is somehow ruder than our own.) It's nevertheless interesting to see what culinary stereotypes the average Google user carries with them, no matter how off-base or potentially offensive they are.

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