Category Archives: Food

Fans queue round the block as tiny Mexican taco stand wins Michelin star

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There was more business than usual and some bemused regulars after El Califa de León was rewarded for its ‘exceptional’ offering

El Califa de León, an unassuming taco joint in Mexico City, measures just 3 metres by 3 metres and has space for only about six people to stand at a squeeze. Locals usually wait for 5 minutes between ordering and picking up their food.

All that changed on Wednesday, however, when it became the first Mexican taco stand ever to win a Michelin star, putting it in the exalted company of fine dining restaurants around the world, and drawing crowds like it has never seen.

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‘Bloody £9 for two’: TikTok twins rage at ice-cream van prices

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Eight-year-olds’ video, which racked up 14m views, hits a sore point for mobilers who have struggled with the cost of living

Like the totemic £8 pint or £5 coffee, the cost of a Mr Whippy ice-cream has become a barometer of a world gone mad. But really, nine quid for two ice-creams? Bloody hell.

That was the damning verdict of an eight-year-old whose TikTok rant over the cost of two screwballs from an ice cream van in the park has racked up 14m views at the time of writing.

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Brexit border IT outages delay import of perishable items to UK by up to 20 hours

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Lorries carrying meat, cheese and cut flowers held up by new checks, with retailers rejecting some orders

Lorries carrying perishable food and plants from the EU are being held for up to 20 hours at the UK’s busiest Brexit border post as failures with the government’s IT systems delay imports entering Britain.

Businesses have described the government’s new border control checks as a “disaster” after IT outages led to lorries carrying meat, cheese and cut flowers being held for long periods, reducing the shelf life of their goods and prompting retailers to reject some orders.

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More than a third of children’s restaurant meals still exceed salt target

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Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Prezzo and Wetherspoon’s among worst offenders, Action on Salt survey suggests

More than a third of children’s main meals sold in restaurants still exceed the government’s maximum salt target, with Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Wetherspoon’s and Prezzo among the worst offenders, a survey suggests.

Action on Salt found that 37% of children’s main meals sold in the “out of home” sector exceeded the government-set maximum target of 1.71g of salt, to be achieved by the end of the year.

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Sake takes UK by storm as Japan’s national drink goes mainstream

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No longer just drunk for courage at karaoke clubs, the ‘food-friendly’ rice spirit is becoming a first choice of connoisseurs

When sommelier Erika Haigh opened the UK’s first independent sake bar, in London’s West End in 2019, passersby would wander in and try to order milkshakes, bewildered by the unfamiliar drink advertised in the window.

“Today, that confusion has largely disappeared,” said Haigh, who has since opened Mai Sake, a shop offering tasting events and meals. “You can now go on a sake bar crawl across London, and you’ll find it featured on the beverage lists of many restaurants – including non-Japanese establishments.”

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Methane emissions: Australian cattle industry suggests shift from net zero target to ‘climate neutral’ approach

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The US cattle industry adopted a ‘climate neutral’ goal in 2021 but scientists say that ‘misses the point’ in keeping global temperature rises below 1.5C

Cattle Australia is lobbying the red meat sector to ditch its net zero target in favour of a “climate neutral” goal that would require far more modest reductions in methane emissions.

The $75bn red meat industry, led by Meat and Livestock Australia, announced a target of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 seven years ago, in an attempt to maintain its social licence and drive investments in emissions reduction technology.

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Scottish salmon industry challenged over move to drop ‘farmed’ from labels

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Fish welfare campaigners say Defra decision facilitates greenwashing and will mislead consumers

Animal welfare campaigners are challenging the decision to allow producers of Scottish salmon to drop the word “farmed” from labelling.

An application by the industry body claimed changing the protected name wording on the front of packaging from “Scottish farmed salmon” to “Scottish salmon” made sense because wild salmon was no longer sold in supermarkets, which consumers were aware of.

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Germans grill Olaf Scholz over soaring cost of doner kebabs

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Die Linke party is among those calling for a Dönerpreisbremse or price cap on the hugely popular street food

The soaring cost of doner kebabs has led to growing calls in Germany for a government subsidy programme to keep the inflation-hit dish, one of the country’s favourites, affordable as politicians report it is frequently cited as a concern in doorstep conversations with voters.

The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has become so used to being asked about the price of kebabs during public appearances that his government has even posted on social media to explain that price rises are in part due to rising wage and energy costs. “It’s quite striking that everywhere I go, mainly from young people, I’m asked whether there shouldn’t be a price brake for the doner,” Scholz has said.

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France reclaims world record after baking baguette measuring 140.53m

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Parisian bakers have claimed victory over rivals in Italy who created a baguette almost 133 metres long in 2019

For the past five years, bragging rights over the world’s longest baguette have belonged not to the residents of a small village or a city in France, but rather to a clutch of bakers 500 miles away in Como, Italy.

On Sunday a crop of 12 bakers from France set out to rectify this, spending hours kneading, shaping and baking their way back to victory.

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‘We are disappearing’: chef Fadi Kattan aims to keep Palestinian heritage alive through food

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Palestinian restauranteur speaks from Bethlehem, where food stalls are sparse as farmlands are under attack

Fadi Kattan looked forlornly at the stalls inside the Bethlehem vegetable market bearing small quantities of oranges, watermelons and cauliflowers. “This stall should be heaped with products, he said. “And over there should be piles of aubergines and courgettes.”

The watermelons from Jenin looked too small for the season, while he wasn’t sure where the boxes of oranges were from. They would normally be from Gaza. At Um Nabil’s stall in the West Bank market where Kattan is a regular customer, she told him she could no longer afford to bring in the best small local cucumbers or piles of green cherries from her village of Artas.

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‘Do they realise what they’re doing?’ Milan takes on ice-cream sellers in war on ‘wild nightlife’

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The Italian city’s attempt to help its sleep-deprived residents is denounced as a step too far

Milan’s leaders have been accused of waging war against ice-cream in their bid to combat “wild nightlife” in the northern Italian city.

Marco Granelli, the deputy mayor for public security, recently announced a proposal banning the sale of takeaway food after midnight in the city’s popular nightlife districts.

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Greece becomes first European country to ban bottom trawling in marine parks

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The law will come into force in national parks within two years and in all of the country’s marine protected areas by 2030

Greece has become the first country in Europe to announce a ban on bottom trawling in all of its national marine parks and protected areas.

The country said will spend €780m (£666m) to protect its “diverse and unique marine ecosystems”.

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‘It’s catastrophic’: Italian restaurants in London struggle to find staff post-Brexit

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UK hospitality industry hit by crisis as thousands of young Italians are forced out by latest round of rules and cost-of-living crisis

Emanuela Reccia has lived in London for almost a decade. She was a teenager when she left her home city of Naples to become a waitress in the UK, bringing her expertise and love of Italian cuisine to the capital.

But the 27-year-old, like thousands of other Italians working in the UK hospitality industry, now feels she has no option but to leave and return to Europe after the latest round of post-Brexit rules.

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New Brexit checks will cause food shortages in UK, importers warn

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Rules due to come in this month will impose new handling fees – and experts say small suppliers are already being driven away

Ministers’ decision to impose Brexit import checks on 30 April will lead to shortages of some foods, flowers and herbs, industry leaders have warned.

In the week after the government was accused of blindsiding the British food industry by giving 27 days’ notice that every consignment of items such as camembert, steak, tulips and chives would be subject to fees of up to £145, small retailers such as delis and farm shops have been scrambling to make sure they still have products to sell.

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‘It’s eating what the sea provides’: Galicia’s Atlantic diet eclipses Mediterranean cousin

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In Fisterra in north-west Spain, a diet rich in seafood, fruit and vegetables survives, and has been found to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart-related conditions

Seagulls shriek, boats bob and the morning sun silvers the waters off the Coast of Death as two sailors take a break from winding up their conger eel lines to ponder the sudden interest in precisely what, and how, people here have eaten for centuries.

Like many in the small Galician fishing town of Fisterra – whose name is derived from the Latin for land’s end, because the lonely peninsula on which it sits is about as far west as you can go in mainland Spain – Sito Mendoza and Ramón Álvarez are a little puzzled by all the fuss over the Atlantic diet.

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Swapping red meat for herring, sardines and anchovies could save 750,000 lives, study suggests

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Switch could also cut prevalence of disability linked to diet-related disease and help tackle the climate crisis, researchers found

Swapping red meat for forage fish such as herring, sardines and anchovies could save 750,000 lives a year and help tackle the climate crisis, a study suggests.

Mounting evidence links red meat consumption with a higher risk of disease in humans as well as significant harm to the environment. In contrast, forage fish are highly nutritious, environmentally friendly and the most abundant fish species in the world’s oceans.

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EU pumps four times more money into farming animals than growing plants

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CAP scheme, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, drives ‘perverse outcomes for a food transition’, says study

The EU has made polluting diets “artificially cheap” by pumping four times more money into farming animals than growing plants, research has found.

More than 80% of the public money given to farmers through the EU’s common agriculture policy (CAP) went to animal products in 2013 despite the damage they do to society, according to a study in Nature Food. Factoring in animal feed doubled the subsidies that were embodied in a kilogram of beef, the meat with the biggest environmental footprint, from €0.71 to €1.42 (61p to £1.22).

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Easter egg prices soar as cocoa crops are hit by climate crisis and exploitation

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Experts say the global shortage of the main ingredient of chocolate is linked to poor conditions for farmers supplying large companies

Every Easter, UK consumers collectively spend more than £1bn on food, drink, gifts, entertainment and about 80m chocolate eggs, racking up an average bill exceeding £50 each. But shoppers this year are paying more than usual: since last Easter, chocolate prices have increased by more than 12.6%, more than double the rise in supermarket food and drink prices.

The cost of cocoa, chocolate’s main ingredient, has been increasing all year, hitting a record high just before Valentine’s Day and again this week, when it was priced at more than $10,000 a tonne – meaning it is currently more valuable than several precious metals, and growing in value more quickly than bitcoin.

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Extortionate Easter eggs and shrinking sweets: fears grow of a ‘chocolate meltdown’

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Poor harvests in extreme weather conditions have led to a tripling of cocoa prices – but farmers have seen no benefit

Around the world this holiday weekend, people will consume hundreds of millions of Easter eggs and bunnies, as part of an annual chocolate intake that can exceed 8kg (18lb) for every person in the UK, or 5kg in the US and Europe. But a global shortage of cacao – the seed from which chocolate is made – has brought warnings of a “chocolate meltdown” that could see prices increase and bars shrink further.

This week, cocoa prices rose to all-time highs on commodity exchanges in London and New York, reaching more than $10,000 a tonne for the first time, after the third consecutive poor harvest in west Africa. Ghana and Ivory Coast, which together produce more than half of the global cacao crop, have been hit by extreme weather supercharged by the climate crisis and the El Niño weather phenomenon. This has been exacerbated by disease and underinvestment in ageing plantations.

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Coffee drinkers have much lower risk of bowel cancer recurrence, study finds

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Exclusive: Scientists say people with disease who drink two to four cups a day are less likely to see it return

People with bowel cancer who drink two to four cups of coffee a day are much less likely to see their disease come back, research has found.

People with the illness who consume that amount are also much less likely to die from any cause, the study shows, which suggests coffee helps those diagnosed with the UK’s second biggest cancer killer.

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