MHarney

It's about the only diet root beer whose taste I find quite decent, and, in this case, it's nearly indistinguishable from Boylan's regular cane sugar root beer -- as opposed to their cola, where their diet version tastes twice as sweet as the cane version and leaves one making an unpleasant face. I find many things sweetened with Splenda cloyingly sweet like that, but the Boylan's diet root beer seems to be done just right -- those items that have a fairly high acidity to start often seem to work best in this regard. (Reminds me of what the miracle berry is said to do to lemons -- a fascinating story recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4 that I listened to last week, made more fascinating by the fact that the Miralin company driven to bankruptcy in the early '70s was based just down the road from my office. Another article, from the WSJ, here.) Yes, my plan would be to buy it by the case. I've hesitated to ask at Whole Foods, the only place I've seen any Boylan's recently, since previous requests for my local outlet to do anything out of the ordinary have been met with looks that said, "Poor misguided soul. He doesn't know the rules, does he?" (The last similar request involved Lyle's Black Treacle, since they carry Lyle's Golden Syrup. I have since found the treacle at the splendid little British Delights store in Westford, MA.) I'll have my boss ask at the place he found, whose name I'm not sure he even mentioned. I know it wasn't a Whole Foods, though.

Has anyone seen Boylan's Diet Root Beer in any retail outlets in the Nashua/Boston/Providence corridor? I can find a good number of their non-diet drinks, but the root beer is a tough nut. My boss just spotted a place in Boston that had nearly everything they make except the diet root beer. I'm tired of paying through the nose to mail-order -- it's about $2.50 a bottle with the understandably exorbitant shipping cost.

Not so rare any longer. As I mentioned a few posts above, they're selling whole bags of 'em once more. I think they made their return just in the last few weeks, because for the last nine or ten years, I would always glance at the PF section in any store I happened to be in. And finally, Tahitis started reappearing everywhere (at least in Mass. and NH) early this month.

Does anyone happen to know if Boylan's Diet Root Beer is available at any retail outlet in the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Providence areas? I'm tired of paying through the nose to get it by mail order ($2.50 or so a bottle with shipping), and I've very unusually come up completely empty-handed after hours of web searches over several months.

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. Pepperidge Farm has just started making entire bags of Tahiti coconut cookies available again for the first time in something like a decade -- instead of just a few at a time in their chocolate cookie assortment. Maybe I should start making a fuss about Chocolite aerated chocolate bars and see if Nestle sits up and takes notice. (Don't tell me about Aero, Wispa, or similar bars -- they don't have the tiny morsels of honey the Chocolite had. But Cadbury does at least have a terrific Marathon bar substitute in their Curly Wurly.)

A look at the "active" (and I use those quotation marks thoughtfully) ingredients shows that Celsius has a makeup remarkably similar to that of Red Bull and other energy drinks, except that it's made with Splenda instead of corn syrup. Of course, any perceived energy boost might be solely from the caffeine. When they say, "increased metabolism," I wonder if they really mean increased heart rate. Now if they made it with, say, N-rayed polywater, I might buy me some. Well, after I finish the bridge payments, anyway. On second thought, just give me a latte.

Curious about a few of the non-obvious items in the list at the end of the article, I googled pregnant avoid plus each of the foods in question. It was interesting to see that there are differerent theories about why sage should be avoided, from the merely bad to the downright scary: might reduce milk production, could induce uterine contractions, might cause bleeding. However, in what I read, there seems to be little agreement, and the only references I saw to bolster the ideas were footnotes citing health food books published the 1980s. A large number of sites (mostly organic/health food/holistic) just say don't eat a particular item, with no explanation at all. Not very helpful. Also interesting is that there are lots of folks who say that spearmint, also on the list, is great calmative as a tea during pregnancy and only a few places seem to say it's bad -- either with no explanation or saying that, in essential oil form, it's also capable of producing contractions. My research just now was, of course, only of a brief nature, but I think that if I were great with child, I might end up so frustrated with and worried about the contradictory opinions or complete lack of concrete information on some of these items that I'd probably end up eating Cream of Wheat with a multi-vitamin chaser most of the time. Wait...what's the scoop on milk? Brown sugar? Maple syrup? Good golly, are some vitamins bad? Yikes. Maybe just some filtered water and a no-salt saltine for me.

Unless the Northeast climate has changed a lot more than I realize, I think that may be a more generic new world/Native American vegetable list. Cacao/cocoa, cassava, and avocado also seem a bit out of place for Massachusetts, which I've never considered tropical, semi-tropical, or even hemisemidemi-tropical. I will, however, allow that this year is turning out much nicer than most, according to the natural gas bill I just got.

Considered significant by the QMUC Food Industry Foundation's manager, anyway: I wonder, did many prospective students who did not sign up tell him those things? I strongly doubt it, so it may well just be his opinions on the matter. Not enough science there, popular or unpopular, to warrant the "Scary TV chefs drive students out the kitchen" headline -- in my opinion, of course. I'd also like to hear Mr. Miskin expound upon how food science is associated with McDonald's, because the only associations I make with McDonalds are "slurry burgers" and "chopped, sliced, and formed chicken whatsits."

T'huh...a day or two after cancellation, an episode that actually made me laugh. Oh, well. C'est la mort.

Same here -- it's from one of my favorite Warner cartoons, "Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid" (1942), in which the rather dim Beaky Buzzard tries to catch the wabbit (sound bite here). I half expected Bourdain to follow up with the also-classic (to me, anyway), "Ohhh, no, no, no, no , no, no! Not gonna do it. Nnnnnope."

Not complaining...just relating a fun moment.

It may interest you to know that this use of quotation marks seems to have caused my left eyebrow to shoot right off the top of my head.

Please don't leave us hanging like that: Inquiring minds would love to know what you replied and what he then said, if anything. In other words, did it get worse or better? How much worse?

Let's not forget about the Dasani harvest, when the taps and salt shakers run all night long.