Messy make-out 😽
About two great inventions, Instapot losing its steam and the financial impact of the SVB crisis and drinking with a stache.
Good morning. We all know that when it comes to culinary preferences, there's always someone who's wrong — and usually that someone isn’t you. With a potential recession looming and the financial system on a verge of a meltdown, it’s time to liven things up with our unpopular food opinion survey!
Be it a well-done steak, dunking Oreos in orange juice, or having cereal with water instead of milk, here's your chance to share your ridiculous and possibly stomach-churning food opinions with us. We won’t judge! Here are ours:
Dhaval: Raw tomatoes have no place on a sandwich.
Tarun: Vanilla ice cream topped with crumbled salty banana chips.
Reply to this email with your unpopular food opinions. We will share some our favorite responses in our next edition on 3/31, after taking a break to digest them!
In the food world
⏲️ Not so instant decline
America's love affair with the Instant Pot has come to a boil-over! The kitchen gadget was an annual bestseller pre-pandemic, spawning a legion of devotees. Since then, their demand has cooled off. Sales of electronic multi-cooker devices (Instant Pot being the majority) plummeted by 50% to $344 million last year. And with other devices, such as the air fryer and air purifier, leaving more hot air than profits, Instant Brands might have to pressure cook their books to stay afloat.
🐭 Sobering science
Scientists at UT Southwestern have found a cure for acute cases of wine flue. An injection of the liver-produced hormone FGF21 can help sober up mice that have passed out from alcohol much faster than those that did not receive the hormone. Although not available for human use this St. Patrick’s day, researchers hope this discovery could lead to effective treatments for acute alcohol intoxication — the cause of more than a million ER visits in the US each year.
🍗 Deboned deception?
Aimen Halim, a Chicago resident really got himself in a flap over Buffalo Wild Wings' boneless wings! He’s filed a class-action lawsuit against the chain, claiming that they falsely advertised their boneless wings as...well, boneless “wings”. Instead, he cried fowl saying that they're just glorified chicken nuggets. He further accused B-Dubs of having caused him "financial injury" because had he known the truth, he would’ve ordered something else.
Advanced Cans Of Rich Nectar
In the 1960s an Irish company Physio-Control developed the first commercial portable defibrillator — devices that send an electric pulse to the heart, for when putting ketchup on an artisanal pizza isn’t shock enough, to restore a normal heartbeat.
Around the same time two geniuses at Guinness, Tony Carey and Sammy Hildebrand were burning the midnight oil trying to figure out a way to deliver the iconic draught-type Guinness experience at home. Their invention is the answer to what causes a rattling sound on shaking an empty Guinness can — a little magical ball called a “widget”.
How does it work?
Worthy of beating the internet for a great tech award, the widget was created and patented by Guinness in 1969, to add a silky and creamy head to their canned beer. This development happened under Project ACORN (Advanced Cans Of Rich Nectar). Best explained by this video, the widget is a small, hollow plastic sphere with a hole filled with nitrogenated beer during canning.
Due to the pressure drop while opening a can, this beer-filled piñata squirts out that fizzy goodness, creating tiny bubbles of nitrogen gas that rise to the top of the beer, resulting in a thick, creamy head.
Legendary trendsetter
The first widget design caused beer cans to explode when served warm. Not wanting to make frat parties too exciting, the design was updated in 1997. In a quest to bring that creamy head to the masses, other beers too, have adopted their own widgets, making it the unsung hero of canned beer.
Food misnomer quiz
Things aren’t always as they seem, especially when the terminology points towards something else entirely. Three of the items below are also lawsuit-worthy, misleading food items, while one is made up. Can you guess which one?
Scotch woodcock: Scrambled eggs on toast with anchovy paste.
Sweetbreads: The thymus or pancreas of a calf or lamb.
Egg cream: A drink made from milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup.
Chile banana split: A spicy grilled steak with peppers, onions and rice.
*Answer at the bottom.
Stranded
Oh boy! Even with an hour lesser, what a week it’s been. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) came crashing down after a game of financial Jenga went south. Subsequently, the US Government had to step in to salvage the leftovers.
Prior to the crash, SVB had assets and liabilities totaling over $200 billion, mainly from US venture-backed tech and life sciences companies. Part of that was funds owned by food and beverage startups.
Why SVB?
What could possibly attract food startups to a tech-centric SVB, unless they have plans to use blockchain for optimizing their avo toast supply chain? In a world where founders struggled to get credit cards or loans from larger banks, SVB helped carb-load these companies with their judgment-free loans.
Having deep relationships in the start-up ecosystem, SVB was the ideal prom partner for early-stage companies to slow dance with. Asian sauce packets company Omsom and food waste reduction company Shelf Engine, are some of the many such customers.
Beyond the food start-up world, SVB found a lucrative niche in the wine industry. In the mid-'90s, the bank opened its wine division and has since loaned about $4 billion (5% of its lending) to wine-centric clients and that friend who maddeningly aerates their wine glass prior to sipping.
What’s next?
While the problem is no longer existential, a shake-up of the banking system is certain. Food startups are caught in the middle of a banking version of The Bachelor, as they nervously look for alternate banks to give them a rose. But for now, they can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that their deposits are secure.
Some more Guinness
Perfect pour aside, get ready to learn some fun Guinness facts that will make you the life of the party… or at the very least, impress your beer-drinking friends.
Maintaining that perfect stubble comes at a cost. Sipping a creamy stout can feel like a messy make-out session with a grizzly bear, resulting in more than 160,000 (~$536,000) pints of Guinness being lost every year in facial hair.
On 31st December 1759, Guinness founder Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin. However, it didn’t include a clause for damages caused by robot invasions or zombie uprisings.
The Guinness Book of World Records was created by the Guinness brewery in 1955 to settle pub arguments as an alternative to rock paper scissors. It’s now one of the best-selling books of all time.
Pi-licious recipes
At an event outside Tokyo in 2006, Akira Haraguchi set an unofficial world record. He recited 100,000 digits of Pi over more than 16 hours by linking each digit with a syllable and creating a collection of epic stories from the words those syllables formed.
22/7 is more than just a number — it’s a spiritual calling. In the honor of Pi day (3/14), here are some pie recipes for you to remember with your own jingle:
Peanut-butter-chai-pie: This no-bake spiced peanut butter pie comes together in minutes, and delivers big flavors.
Brown sugar boba pie: This recipe uses cream cheese sweetened in two ways to mimic the rich milky taste and swirls of brown sugar boba.
Lime basil pie: This sweet lime and basil dessert has a unique taste, plus fewer calories and fat than the traditional Key lime pie.
While this simmers…
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Answer
There is no such thing as a Chile banana split and as clarified by b-dubs, there is no buffalo in their wings either.