Category Archives: Food

‘Like sewage and rotting flesh’: Covid’s lasting impact on taste and smell

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Many sufferers have been left unable to eat due to long-term distortions to their senses

Four months after getting sick with Covid, Anne-Héloise Dautel couldn’t eat anything at all. “I just wanted to vomit, I was gagging at everything around me,” she said. “I couldn’t even stand my own smell. I was showering five times a day.” Coffee, toothpaste, shampoo and roast meat were the worst. By the time she went to hospital, she weighed just 46kg.

Severe weight loss and kidney failure are some of the impacts of smell and taste distortions which leave people unable to eat or drink things they loved, like coffee or bacon, because they smell like rotting flesh or sewage.

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McDonald’s new ‘menu hack’ includes a ‘Land, Air & Sea’ burger

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The fast food chain has said components for the sandwich will be sold separately and customers will have to assemble it themselves

Burger giant McDonalds is causing something of a flap with a bizarre new set of forthcoming ‘menu hacks’ that includes a sandwich called “Land, Air & Sea,” combining fish, beef and a bird with dismal flying abilities – the chicken.

Menu hacks have in recent years become a popular way for the public to customize creations from existing items on fast food chain menus.

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Workers paid less than minimum wage to pick berries destined for UK supermarkets

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Exclusive: Workers in Portugal picking berries ending up on the shelves of Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Tesco allege exploitative conditions

  • Photographs by Francesco Brembati for the Guardian

Farm workers in Portugal appear to have been working illegally long hours picking berries destined for Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Waitrose for less than the minimum wage, according to a Guardian investigation.

Speaking anonymously, for fear of retribution from their employers, workers claimed the hours listed on their payslips were often fewer than the hours they had actually worked.

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Spice up your life! 22 sensational seasonings that aren’t salt or pepper

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Why stick to the same condiments when you can zhoosh dishes up with za’atar or add some yummy yaji? Some of Britain’s best chefs suggest their favourite additions

Historically, Britain has been timid about table condiments. Salt and pepper are the standard duo in the UK, while an exhilarating array of flavourings is deployed globally to tweak cooked foods: traditional spices, evolving spice mixes, clever powders created by imaginative chefs. In deep midwinter, what could be better than sprinkling a dash of vibrant colour across your meals? Here are 22 ways to spice up your food in 2022.

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‘I’m following a dream – giving people my soul food’: the global restaurants bringing life to British streets

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These 15 small venues – all run or founded by immigrants to Britain – are part of the fabric of the nation’s high streets. But after two hellish years, can they survive?

Plus 15 great recipes – from Scandinavia to Tibet, via the Caribbean and Cambodia

• Yotam Ottolenghi on his favourite ingredient

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Zimbabweans put their country on the map in the world of wine

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After rising to the top of a white-dominated industry, a new generation of Zimbabweans are bringing their talents home

Like many young Zimbabweans before and since, Tinashe Nyamudoka left the economic chaos of his country to find work and a better life for himself in neighbouring South Africa.

When he left in 2008, Nyamudoka had never tasted wine. Now, he ranks among southern Africa’s top sommeliers and has his own wine label with international sales.

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‘It’s mind-boggling’: the hidden cost of our obsession with fish oil pills

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The market in this prized commodity is worth billions – but are the supposed benefits worth the cost to global ecosystems?

• Revealed: many common omega-3 fish oil supplements are ‘rancid’

Scanning the shelves and internet for fish oil is a dizzying task. There are dozens of brands available and, although the typical consideration for the popular supplement is that quality matters most, it is not the only factor.

These prized products travel a long way before being labelled as “pure” and “fresh” – starting with the industrial-scale grinding down of a tiny fish that is crucial for healthy ocean and food systems.

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Char siu pork and General Tso’s golden hake – recipes for the lunar new year

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Three food writers suggest celebratory Cantonese, Sichuanese and Taiwanese dishes that will have you over the moon

Traditionally, a whole fish is steamed at the new year to symbolise abundance and unity, because the homonym for fish means “abundance”. I’m using sustainable hake fillets which are tender and succulent. They belong to the cod family so they still have a wonderful texture, slightly smaller flakes than cod but still a delicious sweet taste. For this recipe, I am using hake fillets with the skin on (to keep their shape), sliced into 2cm chunks. I love to shallow fry the fish pieces, make a hot, sour and sweet General Tso’s sauce with dried red chillies, peppers and onions, and then toss the fish pieces back into the dish.

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There’s a new till-free Amazon Fresh shop near me – so I popped in for spring rolls and simmering despair

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Capitalism’s great trick is to make us long for the useless and unnecessary. Under the bright lights, I felt that itch starting up

All I can say is that I should have known better. No, my decision to visit the branch of Amazon Fresh that has just opened near where I live was not at all a good match for the sweeping month-long programme of mindfulness and joy-sparking I tentatively set in motion for myself on 1 January. But there I was all the same, curiosity having got the better of me. And yes, the result was predictably awful. As any wellness guru worth the name could doubtless have told me, this way lay simmering despair and an almost overwhelming desire to buy a packet of Jacob’s Mini Cheddars.

I still have no idea how Amazon got the go-ahead to set up a branch of the grocery wing of its rampaging empire in the grade-II listed building it now inhabits: an old tram depot that when I first came to this part of London was the home of lots of little antique shops (RIP). There was, I seem to remember, a bit of a kerfuffle over its alcohol licence, but in the end it got the green light, in spite of the fact that there are already three large supermarkets mere metres away. Now it stands there rather mournfully, its lurid sign seemingly aiming to attract either those who simply cannot be bothered to cross the road, or those who prefer to keep on their headphones as they shop. (Amazon Fresh’s USP is that it has no tills, so customers need not speak to a single soul.) This, I have read, is one of 10 branches in the capital so far; by 2025, the company hopes to have 260 across the UK.

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There’s nothing worse than a restaurant that makes you feel like an old git | Jay Rayner

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Give us over-50s a menu we can read, grownup waiters and the chance to hold a conversation. It’s not too much to ask – and it makes business sense too

There is only one thing worse than having to thumb your smartphone torch into life so that you can read a restaurant menu: the youthful twentysomething waiter noticing you do so, and bringing you one of those LED clip-on lamps. Short of wheeling the house Zimmer frame to the table for you to use while popping to the loo, there’s nothing better calculated to make you feel like an old git. It’s profoundly irritating, partly because it’s so unnecessary; it’s entirely possible to have moody lighting while also dropping enough on to a table so that those of us whose sight is not quite what it once was can read the damn small print without recourse to Wembley Stadium’s floods.

But mostly it’s irritating because it’s a huge own goal. It makes any restaurant seem exclusive; as in it was designed to exclude those of us not in the very first flush of youth. All too often this is literally the case, albeit usually by happenstance. The restaurant business is generally a younger person’s game. Setting them up and running them requires the sort of long hours that those of us with a few years on the clock may no longer find appealing. And people in their 20s and 30s may well have no idea what older customers want or need, simply because they haven’t got there yet. If a restaurateur only wants punters their own age, then fine. Turn down the lights. Turn up the music. Print the menu in six point Comic Sans.

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French bakers in pain over cut-price supermarket baguettes

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Leclerc destroying ‘dignity’ of profession for selling a baguette for 29 cents (24p)

French bakers have taken aim at a major supermarket chain that is offering inflation-busting low prices for baguettes, saying the move will undermine competition in one of the country’s prized industries.

The Leclerc group said in newspaper ads on Tuesday that “because of inflation, the average price of baguettes could increase significantly. That’s unthinkable”, vowing to cut into its profit margins to cap the cost of the signature French loaf at 29 euro cents (24p).

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Out with the meat, in with the plants as world’s top chefs offer vegan menus

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From London to San Francisco, haute cuisine is joining the food revolution. Michelin-starred chefs explain they’re going meat-free

Alexis Gauthier used to sell 20kg of foie gras a week. Now the chef, whose London-based restaurant became entirely vegan in 2021, only sells a plant-based version. Since becoming vegan, he admits, Gauthier Soho has “lost a lot of customers, sadly”. But he says he has gained even more new diners, all looking for something different and sustainable and prepared to pay the price.

Gauthier is not the only chef to abandon the animal produce traditionally associated with fine dining. While the number of meat-free menus has been burgeoning for some time in lower- and mid-priced restaurants, now a growing number of the world’s top chefs are starting to put plants centre stage.

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UK shops fear gaps on shelves as new Brexit import rules hit

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Regulations likely to result in higher prices and shortages for delis and others

After a few minutes in the queue spent eyeing up the best on offer at the local deli, it is decision time.

Maybe some of the wonderful Parma ham from Italy? With a few slices of Spanish chorizo? And a piece of brie from that farm in Normandy … oh, and definitely some of the black olives from Greece.

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Haiti’s New Year’s Day soup has made headlines. But let’s not be naive about its symbolism

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Sharing soup joumou on 1 January represents what Haitians bring to the world – but remembering that inequality prevails is arguably more important

Whispers. Curfews. Never-ending military parades and shows of arms. Opponents’ bodies exposed for children to see as some sort of macabre art. And always, that nasal voice of “Papa Doc”, François Duvalier, chanting on all radio stations. Those were the days of my childhood under a dictator in Haiti.

But on 1 January, Independence Day, there were three things that made a difference.

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No contact required: Covid fuels vending machine revival in Japan

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After decades of decline, jidō hanbaiki are back in fashion with public wary of human interaction

After a brief wait to the faint whirr of moving machinery parts, the tiny cardboard box that drops into the plastic-covered tray is reassuringly warm. Inside is a perfectly passable burger in a chewy white bun, topped with a blob of ketchup and diced fried onions.

No human interaction occurred in the making of this transaction. The Guardian’s alfresco lunch came courtesy of one of dozens of vending machines in Sagamihara, an unglamorous town near Tokyo.

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Brexit: ‘the biggest disaster any government has ever negotiated’

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Exclusive: British cheesemaker says Brexit and subsequent trade deals have cost his firm £270,000

A British cheesemaker who predicted Brexit would cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds in exports has called the UK’s departure from the EU single market a disaster, after losing his entire wholesale and retail business in the bloc over the past year. Simon Spurrell, the co-founder of the Cheshire Cheese Company, said personal advice from a government minister to pursue non-EU markets to compensate for his losses had proved to be “an expensive joke”.

“It turns out our greatest competitor on the planet is the UK government because every time they do a fantastic deal, they kick us out of that market – starting with the Brexit deal,” he said.

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Slice of life: New York’s famed $1 street pizza under threat from rising costs

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Cheap street pizza is one of New York’s charms, but could supply chain problems and inflation this spell the end?

“Well, you can never go wrong with bread, cheese and tomato,” Lou Reed, poet of the New York streets, would sometimes remark as he passed by one of the city’s multitude of pizzerias.

The late musician was a fan of Coney Island’s legendary Totonno’s, close to the site of of one of the first recorded pizza parlors established by Italian immigrants in the 1880s.

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A seed for all seasons: can ancient methods future-proof food security in the Andes?

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In Peru’s remote villages, farmers have used diverse crops to survive unpredictable weather for millennia. Now they are using this knowledge to adapt to the climate crisis

In a pastoral scene that has changed little in centuries, farmers wearing red woollen ponchos gather on a December morning in a semicircle to drink chicha, made from fermented maize, and mutter an invocation to Pachamama – Mother Earth – before sprinkling the dregs on the Andean soil.

Singing in Quechua, the language spread along the vast length of the Andes by the Incas, they hill the soil around plants in the numerous small plots terraced into a patchwork up and down the Peruvian mountainside.

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Culture in a bowl: Haiti’s joumou soup awarded protected status by Unesco

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The dish, originally cooked by slaves for their owners, has come to symbolise hope and dignity in the troubled Caribbean country

Haiti’s joumou soup, a symbol of hope and dignity for the world’s first black-led republic, has been awarded protected status by Unesco.

The soup, made from turban squash and originally cooked by enslaved African people for their owners in Haiti, was on Thursday added to Unesco’s prestigious list of intangible cultural heritage. It is Haiti’s first inclusion on the list, and the country’s Unesco ambassador, Dominique Dupuy, cried as the announcement was made. The decision is expected to be officially endorsed by Unesco’s general assembly next year.

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