One of the undersold boons of the internet is that it functions a bit like a permanent, rolling global coffee break.
One way to make a traveller smile is to go to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which is about half way between Blue Ball and Paradise.
In 1937 George Orwell suggested that "changes of diet" might be more important than "changes of dynasty or even of religion".
Only the drunk, they say, drive in a straight line in Chicago. The sober zigzag to avoid falling into the city's axle-breaking potholes.
"A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar," read an ad in the Washington Post last month. "A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil a day."
Weeds like dandelions which you can find all over the world and which nobody really gives a second glance to are the happiest.
If yogurt is strategic for the French, olive oil has the same exalted status in Spain.
By tradition a British butcher is a jolly chap; and few could be jollier than
a man whose life was devoted, first, to making the perfect sausage, and, second, to matching it with the perfect foaming pint.
In Arthur Miller's 1949 play "Death of a Salesman", Happy's dream was a simple one: "My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women."
Early Hindu mythology held that pearls were made from dewdrops that the pearl mollusc absorbed when it rose to the surface of the sea at night to breathe.
Roquefort, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Felicien, gruyere, comte, munster, pont l'eveque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de Savoie, crottin de chavignol. A spontaneous familiarity with the display on a three-tier cheese trolley is essential to the national identity of the French.
The Chinese love pork and as their incomes soar they want it more than ever. A domestic herd of 476m pigs, around half of the global pig population, already seems insufficient; China has been a net importer of pork since 2008.
Wisconsin state law prohibits selling milk to the public without pasteurising it first. But Mr Hershberger tried to get around this stricture by setting up a "club" which provided raw milk (also known as "moo-shine") to its members — until state food inspectors raided his farm, destroyed the milk they found and put him on trial.
Most Britons would rather eat scorpions rather than Hershey bars. There is a large Greek fly in the ointment.
Spain is the Saudi Arabia of olive oil, accounting for nearly half of global production.
California has been eating its "seed corn".
Recipes are like flying buttresses, you find out whether they work only by trying them out: no souffled sandwiches, no Chartres cathedral.
As Mrs Obama writes in her new book, "American Grown", not since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden during the second world war had anyone grown food on the White House lawn. And what a garden it is. Pak choi in springtime! Tomatillos in the summer! Seventy thousand bees producing hundreds of pounds of honey to donate to local homeless shelters and give to "visiting dignitaries and heads of state"!
Ataturk's aphorism: "Happy is he who calls himself a Turk."
Louis XIII cognac is a blend of up to 1200 different eaux-de-vie aged between 40 and 100 years old and the prices are starting from $1.500 — to $40.000 for a magnum of the Black Pearl edition.
In making cookies, does the use of butter or margarine affect the size of the cookie?
France's tradition of making exquisite luxuries dates back at least to the court of Louis XIV. The sun king financed ebenistes (cabinet-makers), tapisseurs (upholsterers), menuisiers (carpenters) and other artisans who made beautiful and largely useless things for the court of Versailles. Bernard Arnault might be his heir.
Cases of Westvleteren 12, on sale at 39 ($53) at the Trappist Abbey of St Sixtus of Westvleteren, turn up on online beer-sellers for as much as $800. (In a rare easing of the rules, in November the monks released a batch of 93,000 six-packs for the Belgian market, to pay for repairs to the abbey. Next year 70,000 six-packs will go on sale worldwide.) Beer is to Belgium as wine is to France.
Johnnie Walker's labels make it abundantly clear how much a customer has spent. Red Label is the cheapest. Black is pricier, followed by Green, Gold and Blue. Beyond Blue is King George V, which sells for more than $500 a bottle. Criminals in South Africa buy it to prove they are successful criminals. The ruling class in Angola is another promising market.
How in God's name can I tell the difference between Scotch and Bourbon? They are all bottles, aren't they?
No one likes to think about who was in their hotel room before them, let alone what they got up to. The best to hope for is that your lodgings are clean and hygienic. But are they? The TV remote control and the bedside- lamp switch are among the most contaminated.
When in a party mood, who trusts the Party?
If you are going to use GPS to take you to a location, sonar to identify the fish and a lure which reflects light that humans can't even see, you may as well just go to McDonald's and order a fish sandwich.
The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became as stylised as a ballet. The basic skills brought to the table were expected to include politesse (sincere good manners), esprit (wit), galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement (cheerfulness) and flatterie. More specific techniques would be required as the conversation took flight. A comic mood would require displays of raillerie (playful teasing), plaisanterie (joking), bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical figures involving "subtle, unexpected wit", according to Benedetta Craveri, a historian of the period), and, later, persiflage (mocking under the guise of praising). Even silences had to be finely judged. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an "eloquent" silence, a "mocking" silence and a "respectful" silence. The mastery of such "airs and tones", he said, was "granted to few".
The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that the men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms. But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy-70% more than the women. The men did not move any faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms.
Greenland sharks cannot help but capture the imagination. These primeval inhabitants of the deep, icy waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans can live to 400, possibly even 500 years old, are cigar shaped, and often have worm-like parasites on their luminous eyes that are said to hypnotise their prey. Their bodies are covered with razor-like "skin teeth" and their meat contains a toxin; people who eat it start to hallucinate, become incoherent and stagger around, becoming "shark drunk".
The economists of his day took their cue from Jeremy Bentham and his "utilitarian" philosophy. They calculated happiness, or utility, as the sum of good feelings minus bad, and argued that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the sole springs of human action. One even looked forward to the invention of a hedonimeter, a "psychophysical machine" that would record the ups and downs of a man's feelings just as a thermometer might plot his temperature. Such people, Carlyle complained, fancied that man was a "dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on".
Botox was used 336,834 times by American men in 2010, up 9% from 2009, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. But women are still 15 times more likely than men to have their faces frozen.
I'm on a seafood diet — I see food and I eat it.
As anyone who has been to Japan knows, there are strict rules about bathing in onsen, or hot springs. Bodies must be scrubbed beforehand, swimming trunks are banned and tattoos are taboo.
He is a pescatarian, i.e. a vegetarian who eats fish.
More voters come to believe that Fidesz and its friends, just like their Socialist predecessors, have carved up Hungary among themselves as if it were a giant salami.