Another Helping of Food Related Weirdness – 6 (and a bit)

If your love-life needs a lift, pork is as effective as Viagra, or so said Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner last week at a press meeting to announce cheaper pork prices. In a surprise boon to local political comedy writers, President Kirchner claimed to know from personal experience that “pork consumption improves sexual activity,” before adding “I’m a pork fanatic.” Her comments were unsurprisingly echoed by Juan Uccelli, who heads up the Argentinean association of pork producers, who claimed Denmark and Japan’s “more harmonious sexual lives” were down to their high pork consumption. No word yet as to how tender Cristina likes her pork, but this surely brings a whole new layer of meaning to “baby’s got back!” (AFP).

Of course this is just another string for the bow of the world’s greatest all around superfood, bacon. And it’s not the only new talent to come to light, bacon also makes you smarter. At least it does if your mother ate it. Scientists from the University of North Carolina are claiming the micronutrient choline, which is abundant in pork products, is vital in helping foetal brain development (Telegraph).

Clearly then, the British are not eating enough bacon. Not only do they have to put up with a reputation for being lousy lovers but in a recent study for the UK’s National Farmers Union, 26% of under-16s polled said that bacon came from sheep, and 29% thought that oats grew on trees (Daily Mail).

So it is perhaps a small consolation that an English sparkling wine trounced traditional French champagnes to be crowned Champion of Worldwide Sparkling Wines in an annual competition held by Italian wine magazine Euposia. Nyetimber's Classic Cuvée 2003 beat off entries from Bollinger and Louis Roederer in a blind tasting, despite costing less than £30 per bottle (Telegraph).

Also sure to win awards is the newest attraction in Beijing, China. The “World Chocolate Wonderland” is a 20000 square metre theme park devoted to the food and boasts life-size replicas of terracotta warriors, a BMW and a basketball player caught mid-leap, all made of chocolate. The centrepiece must be an array of chocolate fountains that endlessly propel 1.5 tonnes of melted chocolate in all directions. The park is open to April, but plans to reopen next January with all new exhibits (Movie Channel).

Perhaps they’d like to bid for the chocolate and sweet reproduction of a statue of Lenin currently on display in Bucharest, Romania? The statue, which stands on the plinth that once held the real thing, is to be auctioned off to raise money for a museum of statuary from the country’s Nazi and Communist past, with “pride” of place going to a 62 foot granite bust of Lenin (Daily Express).

More food sculptures now, this time out of cheese. Prudence Staite has created three of the things for a display in London’s Kings Road Gallery, “Dita von Cheese”, “Chedda (Cheryl) Cole” and “Barack Low-bama” out of LowLow mature cheese, which is ideal for sculpting apparently (Metro).

But such is the demand for quality chocolate that in Peru cocoa beans are replacing coca plants as the cash crop of choice. While Peru remains the world’s second largest cocaine producer (after Colombia), the country’s cocoa exports have risen 400% in the last decade, catapulting it into the top ten of world chocolate growers (Time).

And it’s not just chocolate on the rise, enrolments to an Italian “ice-cream university” have seen a 90% rise as recession-hit executives look to Italy’s favourite dessert for new careers. Around eleven and a half thousand people paid over $900 a week to learn their craft at the Gelato University in Bologna in 2009, up from 6000 in 2008. But of course this is not the first time ice-cream has appeared as a recession-buster (Telegraph).

Though whether you invest in pork, cocoa or gelato, one business lesson worth learning is that it pays to "keep it in your pants." After being caught in flagrante, an adulterous couple have been ordered by a Malaysian court to compensate their Penampang community with four buffaloes and a pig and to also pay a fine to the court of 1000 ringgit, equivalent to about $300 (CNews).

Needless to say, the buffaloes and pig didn’t get a say in this but that may be about to change, in Switzerland anyway. This March Swiss voters will decide, in the first national referendum of its kind, whether animals ought to be represented by lawyers in court. Previously, this right has only been extended to asses (News:Lite).

But the weirdest food-related incident of the week must be trucker Eric Gremm of Massachusetts, who crashed his truck into a house after falling unconscious from eating chilli. A road-bump, claims 59 year-old Gremm, caused him to choke on his mid-drive dinner and pass out, causing the crash (STV).

(Image Source: Daily Mail.)

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