snackdown! - 1.15.10

as part of the ongoing changes here at eat!drink!snack!, this week, i'm introducing a new friday column...the snackdown! every friday, i'll be providing you with a rundown of my favorite snack/food/drink related stories from the week past. this week, we've got a contest for snacking genius, a ban on pork rinds, free cookies, salt chugging & predictions for 2010. enjoy!

• on tuesday, brooklyn's ici hosted "the next big small brand contest for culinary genius," where bklyn batch craft jerky took home the people's choice prize for their "orange-ginger strips of smoke-cured, grass-fed beef" jerky & kombucha brooklyn won the judge's prize for their "pleasantly mild iteration of [their] fermented tea." personally, i'd vote for orange-ginger beef jerky over fermented tea any day of the week. (ny times)


• lovers of authentic mexican pork rinds had their hearts broken this week when the u.s.d.a. announced that starting this thursday, pork rinds not accompanied by an official government certificate will be seized at the border. drug, gun & human traffickers who have always dreamed of getting into the food business rejoiced. (abc news)


• since travel basically sucks these days, companies like doubletree hotels & midwest airlines are trying to ease the pain of travel by baking cookies & dispensing them to their customers. they've both been doing so for around a quarter of a century, but if there was ever a time in history that called for free cookies, it's now. (ny times)


• yesterday, to protest nyc mayor michael bloomberg's latest health crusade--salt--awesome-hatted radio host curtis sliwa decided that it'd be a good idea to call bloomberg "the health care nazi" & then chug a bunch of morton's salt. the results...sodiumtastic hilarity! the "salt crackdown" segment starts just after the nine-minute mark. (ny1)


• it's a new year & with that comes new food trends. "out with the cupcake in with the new," i like to say. the detroit free press looked at some possible trends for 2010, specifically the rise of "umami," the fifth taste. too bad that they misspelled it "unami" in the headline. i'm pretty sure nobody's going to reintroduce an extinct native american dialect in an effort to spice up the food world. (detroit free press)