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Sharp news commentary blog the Awl breaks down Walmart’s $20 Thanksgiving feast, which actually includes a disturbingly long list of edible features for a disturbingly low price. Prices vary a bit from state to state, but in general your Jackson gets you:

• One 12-pound Grade A turkey
• Three 11- to 15.5-ounce cans Green Giant vegetables
• Two 14-ounce cans Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
• Three 6-ounce boxes of Stove Top stuffing
• One 5-pound bag of red potatoes
• One 12-count package of Sara Lee dinner rolls
• One 22-ounce pumpkin roll cake

This is both inspiring and terrifying.

The Atlantic writes about an effort to take back the mai tai, a beverage that must surely rank among the most debased drinks in modern bartending. Typically a syrupy-sweet fruit bomb, it can—and should—have a more mature flavor. Julie Reiner, a New York mixologist, makes a mai tai “with aged rum, fresh lime, and almond syrup, with a little Corduba rum floated on top (so the last few sips aren’t diluted by melted ice).”

Not long ago, I edited a story by Nick Kosevich, a bartender whose attention to detail and interest in reviving now-too-sweet drinks (such as daiquiris) run parallel to Ms. Reiner’s; his meditation on the Old Fashioned ran for a few pages and included the following comparison of old school versus new school:

“Much of the modern-day Old Fashioned-related controversy can be blamed upon Wisconsinites. A Wisconsin Old Fashioned consists of 1 tsp of granulated sugar (usually a little white packet), 2 dashes of Angostura bitters, 1 1/2 oz of brandy, and a splash of 7Up. The sugar and bitters are added first with a splash of 7Up to dissolve the sugar, then the brandy is added, and topped with ice and 7Up to finish the drink. This version is then garnished with a flag (a bar term for an orange slice wrapped around a cherry) …

“The classic recipe for the drink is 1 sugar cube, 3 dashes of bitters, and 3 oz of bourbon or rye whiskey, not brandy, served in an old fashioned glass on the rocks with a lemon twist.”

The explosion of boutique liquors and bitters available for sale, and the press received by mixologists, may suggest that Americans are getting more sophisticated about their cocktails. But the menu at any given faux-neighborhood midrange chain restaurant is a good reminder that we still have a long way to go. Once the real mai tai has made it to T.G.I. Friday’s, we might be getting somewhere.

The Hungry Beast has a revealing interview with Guy Fieri this week that unearths some interesting nuggets. To wit:

1. He owns a T-shirt cannon.

2. He is going on a national tour “in a bus stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon and painted with flames.”

3., 4., and 5. “He now travels with a bodyguard to events, has bras and underwear thrown at him during cooking demos, and counts Sammy Hagar and members of AC/DC as close friends—no wonder he speaks about himself in rock-star language.”

Whoa. Visit the Hungry Beast to learn about Fieri’s other quirks, such as naming dishes things like No Can Beato This Taquito and Mac-Daddi-Roni Salad.

Bruce Buschel is opening a restaurant. And he has some ideas about what he’d like his staff to do and not do. So many ideas, in fact, that he was able to supply the New York Times with a list of “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do.” Buschel is on the ball; witness some of the picks of his list:

“8. Do not interrupt a conversation. For any reason. Especially not to recite specials. Wait for the right moment.”

“20. Never refuse to substitute one vegetable for another.”

“32. Never touch a customer. No excuses. Do not do it. Do not brush them, move them, wipe them or dust them.”

Buschel was on NPR a few days later, and he had more to say. Here he is on servers touching customers:

“I think it’s not a polite thing to do. I think a lot of people can take it the wrong way. The study that’s being quoted doesn’t mention genders. I’m sure a lot of women think that if they touch a customer on the shoulder, their tip goes up. It may or may not be true. I just think that, again, you’re invading somebody’s space. I know recently, I was standing in a restaurant waiting at the bar and somebody came over from behind and actually physically moved me, grabbed my two shoulders and moved me. And I turned around and he said, the waiter has to get past. So there are all degrees of touching. And some people may get excited and some people may be offended. So I think the best thing is just to not do it.”

Yeah, keep your paws off me!

The brutally obvious nature of the picks in Topless Robot’s “10 Most Beloved and Unhealthy Gaming Snacks” doesn’t diminish the fleeting-if-all-too-real vicarious pleasure a casual reader picks up from hearing the analysis of total crap ranging from Oreos to Slim Jims to that ghastly World of Warcraft Mountain Dew.

On the topic of doughnuts, Topless Robot notes:

“It is one of the few foods you can buy a box of, bring it to a friend’s house and only your most picky of bitch friends will not find something they like.”

Not Pulitzer-caliber stuff, but, to be fair, Combos aren’t winning any James Beard Awards anytime soon.

We’ve got a plum proposition for one very specific food journalist: Come and work for CHOW.com. We’ve got a food editor position open. Old media is crumbling around us, have you heard? And while you’re cleaning your hands of that sticky paste-up goo and worrying about filling the front of the book, or whatever it is print editors do these days, we’re entertaining readers and teaching people how to cook. Which is why you got into food media in the first place, right?

As we say in the job posting, the best candidate for this job will make us laugh. He or she will manage a kitchen, lead a team, and want to perform in front of the camera but not clown around or be superearnest. The food editor will, above all, convey information clearly and directly. He or she will think creatively about food and online media and techniques. Will love to eat and love to learn about food, yet will be skeptical about the old ways of doing things. The food editor will have ideas about bok choy and user engagement and online communities. But won’t use words like decadent and yummy.

We have other criteria; see the job listing on mediabistro.com or CBS Interactive.

An almost completely innocuous Los Angeles Times article on raising vegetarian kids touched off rapidly updated and at times hilarious/offensive /interesting debate on dietary choices over at FARK.com.

An amuse-bouche of the back-and-forth:

“Vegetarians are the worst. Can’t we round them, teetotallers, religious people and rap-metal fans up and ship them off to Iran?”

“Why do vegetarians always look so unhealthy?”

“You’re an idiot.
Ever heard of Bill Pearl?
Four time Mr. Universe?
Used to rip license plates in half to demonstrate his strength?
He was a vegetarian -- lacto-ovo, but still a vegetarian.
Your theory -- he just kicked sand in its face.”

“My ancestors didn’t work their way up the food chain for me to become a vegetarian.”

“meat carnivores are militant and defensive about eating meat. I mean, I’d agree that vegetarians are annoying, but this thread is more self-righteous and annoying than any vegetarian that I’ve ever met.”

And, of course, you can’t do this argument without quoting Jim Gaffigan:

A recent visit to a normally well-stocked liquor emporium in Minneapolis in search of an excellent midrange single-malt brought this writer nothing but frustration—the stuff wasn’t available at the distributor level, a clerk explained, thanks in part to a booming Asian market with a seemingly endless thirst for good brown liquor.

That anecdote connects nicely with a Telegraph story about obscenely expensive bottles of old Scotch being “snapped up” by superrich customers in China and the Gulf States.

Whether the Scotches (which, unlike fine wines, don’t age once bottled) are worth the asking price or we’re witnessing another Rockefeller Center–style fleecing of the East by the West is up for debate.

From the Telegraph: “Dave Broom, contributing editor to Whisky Magazine: ‘The whiskies don’t have to be this pricey. I get the feeling sometimes that it’s more about lovely boxes than lovely liquid. That’s not to say malt whisky can’t operate in the luxury category, but some distillers are pushing things too far in my view.’”

Distillers, of course, take a different stance:

“David Robertson, head of the Dalmore brand, which released twelve bottles of The Dalmore Sirius 1951 vintage last month, said all of them had been bought within a week. ‘These are very limited editions of very old whiskies. There just isn’t much 50-year-old whisky around any more. We are lucky enough to have some,’ he said.”

If availability of great whiskey is a sign of civilizational power, the West may want to play some catch-up. And if it’s not, it’s still dashed annoying when Zipp’s is out of Highland Park 18.

Image source: Flickr member sashafatcat under Creative Commons

On November 12, Chef David Chang, who recently caught heat for dissing San Francisco chefs for only putting figs on a plate rather than manipulating food in interesting ways, is a featured speaker at the IdeaConference, sponsored by Advertising Age in New York. I’m intrigued to see what awkward badassery Chang will pull out next.

He was in fine form on Munchies, the new food show from VBS (see video clip below). Quick digression: I love VBS for three reasons. First, Spike Jonze is the creative director. And they have the rights to use any Black Lips song (and they make good use of it). Then there’s the cute show Special-Needs Pets, which is a real winner.

Munchies’ first episode profiles Chang. On the show, I enjoyed how candid he was, admitting he’s not the greatest chef and that he couldn’t keep up with the other cooks while working at Café Boulud. But the episode never followed through on how he actually got to where he is now, instead fast-forwarding to a night on the town with Chang and a New York Times writer who’s the coauthor of Chang’s new book. They didn’t seem to have enough to say to each other, and it looked like the producers off camera had to keep asking Chang more questions. When they arrived at Chang’s Ssam Bar, he got drunk and made some food for Chef José Andrés, who responded to a Chang condiment by saying, “Only a crazy mind would come up with a coffee-mayo bullshit.”

The whole thing felt a little uncomfortable and forced, and nothing actually happened in the unnecessarily long 12-minute video. So here’s my pitch to you VBS producers: Just get famous chefs into a tiny apartment, get them really, really drunk, and then have them cook something for you. Of course you’ll need five hot semicelebrities just hanging out at the shoot for no reason other than to try the chefs’ severely compromised dishes.

Here is a portrait of modern Britain in a tiny, terrifying gastronomic nutshell served up by the Telegraph:

“Chris Pether, 70, was told by his local Asda superstore in Aberdeen that health and safety rules prevented the sale of more than one loose lemon, orange or grapefruit. A supervisor explained the policy had been introduced to protect the public because local youths had been throwing the fruit at people.”

There you have it: Old men can no longer buy fruit because of a prevailing public opinion that fruit is most typically used as a missile hurled by thugs at passersby. It’s not exactly clear what dystopia this comes straight out of, but a number of British science-fiction writers are increasingly looking prophetic instead of merely grouchy.

Ari Weinzweig, cofounder of Zingerman’s (home of great food affordable enough for kings and queens), shares some information on the marvelous pawpaw, a native American fruit that was recorded as George Washington’s favorite dessert. Passion fruit–esque in flavor and often puréed into custard or pie, the pawpaw has a profound novelty factor, and is worth a bit of meditation. And, hey! For a mere $75, you can have 12 ounces of your own Zingerman’s pawpaw gelato by mail, along with five other flavors of frozen Thanksgiving-compliant yumminess.

Image source: Flickr member sarahemcc under Creative Commons

If it irritates you that the Smart Choices food program claimed that Ritz Bits Peanut Butter Chocolatey Blast crackers are good for you, you’ll probably be stoked to read Dan Mitchell of Slate describe San Francisco’s assault on spurious cereal health claims.

Mitchell notes: “The suspension of Smart Choices didn’t stop insane label claims. Far from it.” Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies are “still claiming, in giant letters emblazoned across the box, that the sugary cereal ‘[n]ow helps support your child’s immunity.’ In this worrisome time of virulent viruses, such a claim is likely to give some parents the wrong idea. But really, at any time, such a claim is at best amoral and at worst sinister.”

Whether San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has the standing to take the company to the woodshed remains to be seen. But so long as every new product on the market (other than, perhaps, Drank) feels the need to sell itself as some kind of tasty parallel form of medicine, I’m grateful someone is working to make the marketeers back up their boasts.

Reporting from Sao Paulo and Great Britain, the Telegraph puts together a great story on a Pret a Manger “fresh” chicken sandwich. Why the reporting from Sao Paulo, you might reasonably wonder? The fresh chicken is, as it turns out, frozen chicken from Brazil.

Here’s the gemstone at the core of this story:

“Pret a Manger, the sandwich chain which boasts of using only ‘fresh, natural ingredients,’ rears its chickens in small farms around Marau, in the south east of Brazil, and then sends them to Perdigao for processing and freezing. The frozen, raw meat is then shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic to be defrosted, cooked and put in sandwiches. Until Pret changed its website this week, consumers were not told of the food’s origins.”

Also to the story’s credit, it investigates working and farming conditions in Brazil, and reports that they’re not a horror show: Workers make a small but not appalling wage, often suffer from repetitive stress injuries, and work in cold, wet processing plants that lead to ill health … well, maybe it’s a bit of a horror show. The piece is a good read for anyone who ever considers believing anything told to him by a large food company, under just about any circumstances.

Never in the history of humanity has there existed a Halloween pumpkin-purchasing flow chart as descriptively accurate and generally useful as this one, which ran in the excellent online comic Sheldon. Flow charts: If you’ve got a lot of information and little space, they’re the way to go. Even if the topic is squash.

Thesis of a recent New York Times first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: It’s really, really difficult to work at a co-op for 2.75 hours every four weeks.

Actual point proven by the New York Times’ first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: You kind of get what you pay for when you ask an MFA in poetry to perform manual labor.

Of course, Park Slope Food Coop horror stories are hardly unknown to us here at CHOW.

Image source: Flickr member stevendamron under Creative Commons

On November 3, the Food Network’s new Wii game, Cook or Be Cooked, is scheduled for release. Though Eat Me Daily says the game appears to be a rejiggered version of Cooking Mama, Tracey John, a self-professed “terrible cook” at Wired, kinda got into it:

“Most of the motion gameplay involved a lot of shaking controllers to mimic the actions you’d do in actual cooking: Waggle the Wii remote to shake out the seasoning and cut vegetables; shake the Nunchuk to retrieve your saucepan or bowl; tilt the remote to oil the saucepan, pour liquids and turn the stove on and off.

“There’s also a timer for how long each item should be cooked, so you have to watch the clock. Thankfully, to speed things up you simply hit the C button. To earn extra points, try multitasking by beginning to cut and cook the potatoes for the potato salad while handling other food-prep chores.”

Hey! Sounds like my kitchen where I grind out a dinner every single night.

Apparently, drinking coffee in the nude—even in one’s own house—can have legal consequences. The CBS Crimesider blog covers the harrowing story of a dude in Springfield, Virginia, who woke up, happily noted that his roommates were gone, and had a cup of coffee without bothering to put on clothes.

“Things got complicated when a passer-by spotted the bare-skinned barista while taking her 7-year-old son to the local school bus stop.”

The onlooker alleges that the man exposed himself at his doorway and in his front window. Was the guy ignorantly stumbling around in the buff or a pervert? It’s now up to a court to decide. If found guilty of deliberately exposing himself, the man faces misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail.

As the Mexican Day of the Dead starts to pick up cultural steam north of the border, the Daily Beast digs into the holiday a bit, taking the casual reader past the colorful candy skulls that represent the outer limit of knowledge for a great many Americans. Here are three thumbnail insights from Beast contributor Ana Sofia Pelaez that merit reading in their majestic original form:

1. In the Yucatán, the holiday is called Hanal Pixán and can be translated as—and this is pretty cool—”the path of the soul through the essence of food.”

2. It’s not just food that gets served up as part of the offering process. “Vices as well as pleasures are remembered, and beer, tequila, mezcal, or even cigarettes can be included.”

3. The Day of the Dead is really the Days of the Dead: November 1, notes Pelaez, is dedicated to children who have passed on, while adults are remembered on November 2.

Image source: Flickr member Orin Zebest under Creative Commons

You won’t believe it, but guess what—Slate has published an article wherein a writer for the magazine is a total contrarian buzz-kill. While most of us celebrate autumn with Halloween costume parties and obligatory airings of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Slate embraces the season by dusting off a three-year-old article with the following thesis: “Apple picking may be a satisfying ritual and pleasant day out with the kids, but it’s also a wasteful scam.”

In the story, Daniel Gross says of apple picking, “It’s the best use of child labor since Manchester’s early 19th-century textile mills,” and declares that it “sheds light on some unflattering truths about the American economy.”

We can only hope that the magazine spikes Gross’s upcoming piece about Christmas cookies, in which sprinkles are compared to “a rainbow of tiny thalidomide pellets,” and, while talking about linzertorte cookies, Gross invokes Stalin’s liquidation of the Soviet kulak class.

Red Bull’s recent promotional freebie for its cola is probably the coolest thing it’s done since it sponsored extensive can-derived art. The promo, as shown on the Dieline package design blog, is a custom bag containing a custom box containing the 17 key ingredients that give Red Bull Cola its taste. Say whatever you like about energy drinks and mass-market colas—the ingredients that go into Red Bull Cola look damn near majestic when presented in raw form in a compartmentalized wooden box.