Following the continuing saga of our favorite least-awful sugar substitute, we have the obligatory legal action:

The marketers of the hot-selling sugar substitute filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Delaware yesterday alleging that the Sugar Association and other groups are waging a “malicious smear campaign” against their product in an attempt to boost sugar sales.
[…]
Yesterday’s suit is in response to a false-advertising lawsuit the Sugar Association filed against McNeil [the Splenda people] in California in December, Watts said. That lawsuit, which does not target Tate & Lyle P.L.C., the manufacturer of Splenda, seeks to prevent the marketers of Splenda from continuing what it called a “misleading” advertising campaign.

Nuisance lawsuits rot your teeth, you know.

Our thanks to Kanishka for drawing attention to the recent DCist post about Israeli Falafel- a post that that rapidly devolved into an argument over cultural plagiarism of traditional Arabic foods. We’ve done some in-depth research into this matter (a couple of google searches) and these seem to the facts.
The claims:
Arabs believe that Israelis have stolen the concept of Falafel and turned it into what is popularly referred to as the”Israel’s National Snack.” No tourist brochure is without a picture of it, popular songs refer to it, and Israeli cookbooks contain recipes for it.
Israelis believe that it is silly to try to ‘own” a method of frying legumes, and that falafel is an international food, like hamburgers and pasta. Though no one claims to have created the recipe from scratch, Israeli cooks have as much a claim on it as anyone.
The Facts:
Falafel is old. There are records of both Jews and Arabs eating Falafel in the middle east for at least 3000 years, so the argument of who was technically eating it first doesn

As many fads do, the Anti-MSG paranoia that has swept the USA in the past probably confuses the outside world. An American population permanently on the look-out for ‘the next cool thing to fear’ apparently missed the fact that the entire population of China does not go around clutching their heads in pain. After all, MSG (literally, boiled sea kelp) had been a staple of the Chinese diet for thousands of year, you figure they would have noticed by now.
No, the entire hoopla can be linked back to a single letter to the editor to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968, written by a man commenting that he sometimes felt strange after eating Chinese food. No research, no testing, the concept of MSG being bad for you is based on the equivalent of one one guy’s preference for Thai.
Of course, just after an alien movie comes out, UFO sightings go up. It was only a matter of time before reports of “strange MSG-related phenomenon” started coming in and “caring” Chinese restaurants were forced to put out the “no MSG signs”.
i assume most of this has died down by now- recent tests show that MSG is no more harmful than a similar amount of sugar, salt, or a piece of bread- any effects people might perceive are usually caused by the standard sugar rush when eating heavily on an empty stomach.
Incidentally, a food with much more MSG in it than Chinese that somehow managed to evade the witch-hunt? Cheddar Cheese.
No, I’m not going to footnote sources, this is a blog, dammit, not an academic paper. I just got out of a 3 hour meeting about department policy and currently hate the world.

As if the huge Splenda shortages this season weren

Goddamn, is zaf sick. She’s rolling around on the mattress muttering about butterflies and the Department of Labor. The only thing that could cause such behavior would have to be that most dire combination of maladies, the flu a cold, and food poisoning.
So what do you give to the invalid to whom everything tastes like vaguely salty hair, but without the excitement?

• Garlic
  

Pepper is a wonderful spice, single- handedly causing bloody trade wars in the Middle East, and allowing Europeans to eat taste-disguised rotted meat in the middle ages. Carrying on that great tradition A whole bunch of protestors at yesterdays inauguration got themselves pepper sprayed on Pennsylvania Ave . We hope everyone’s alright.

Picture from NYTimes.com. I know, I know, if pepper spray actually has any pepper in it it’s probably the other kind of pepper. Forgive, its hard to come up with a pun in a hurry.